Willem de Rooij’s installation King Vulture comprises a set of four painted copies of photographs, commissioned by the artist to Yaohui Zhu and his team at the Yunxi Art Studio in Dafen, China. The original photographs depict works by 17th-century Dutch painter Jan Weenix (ca. 1640–1719) that feature the motif of a king vulture. This scavenger was first seen in Europe when it was imported from occupied territories in Dutch colonies in northern Brazil and Suriname. In Weenix’s works the king vulture is rendered an exoticized other floating in fictional cultural landscapes surrounded by imported animals as well as those local to the Netherlands.

The contrasts between reality and fiction, the local and the exotic in these paintings illustrate the moral, political, and artistic maneuvers of a young republic that was also a colonial power. For more than a decade, De Rooij has been researching Weenix, his cousin Melchior d’Hondecoeter (1635–1695), and their student Dirk Valkenburg (1675–1721).

His analysis of their interconnected bodies of work tells a story not only of the iconographic promotion of power in the Dutch empire, but also one of intergenerational exchange and shared authorship. It could be assumed that there are programmatic and economic overlaps between the 17th-century Dutch painting workshop, with its typically prolific and multi-authored output, and present-day practices in Dafen. By layering and exhibiting different types of reproduction techniques, De Rooij questions contemporary ethics around ownership and loan politics in the realm of public collections.

Link

https://2022.steirischerherbst.at/en/program/artists/3664/willem-de-rooij