Gam Klutier
(Delft, Netherlands 1946)
‘I am a space tumbler… ultimately the dance of creation starts when the head is left behind and the heart free to take over… I paint a bridge between now and me. We are moots of dust with a core of light tumbling through space. Painting is my desperate prayer, my holy weaving uniting now and me’.
The essence of Gam Klutier´s work is both forceful and elusive; in his paintings, which conjure up an imaginary world without boundaries, and in his sculptures, compact and light at once.
It can be a torrent, a stream, a drop that falls upon glass. The artist´s hand has learned a freedom that allows this spontaneous world to appear almost continuously before his eyes, surprising even himself.
It was not always this way. Those who have known him over the years since he came to Peru, have come to know a calm, cheerful man, distant from vanity and ostentatiousness. There was a time when he was a promising New York publicist, experiencing the pressures of a profession that thrives from the intersection between creativity and business. Dutch by birth, his promising career drove him to New York. Of course, there has to be a turning point that brings about change. Klutier met the sculptor Lika Mutal in Amsterdam, where they were both artists in the same gallery. Four months later, Klutier decided to make a radical shift in his existence and he travelled to Peru for the first time. His bond with Mutal lasted for 36 years until her death in 2016.
This change was hugely significant in his career as an artist. “I left the mundane and busy New York existence to live more within myself, more connected to myself as an artist and in a spiritual way. One has to understand what success can do to a person and what that person can do to with It. That type of success didn´t mean anything to me, I wanted something else”.
Upon his arrival in Lima, he discovered a totally different type of city to the societies that he had been familiar with in Europe and the United States. He began to walk the beaches, collecting fragments of objects, detritus, pieces of wood brought in by the tide, shells, feathers, curious remains of any identifiable object. Shipwrecks scattered their ruins and turned them into little pieces of history. With these, the artist created small fragile sculptures that were imaginative, moving and even joyful. “I didn´t have any money and it was the only thing that I could do. I walked the streets in surprise, observing burning objects, rubbish, dogs in the streets. All of this attracted me in a strange way. Assembling these sculptures was like a game for me”, he remembers. While he rebuilt his life, he discovered the strand that would lead him out of the labyrinth. It was perhaps this important strand that has given shape to his work as a sculptor.
Many of us who saw his first exhibitions of these objects in Lima, at Galería 9 (1982) and Forum (1983), still remember them. These plastic findings radiated a unique freshness and beauty, small sculptures that combined pieces of refuse that turned them into little beings, abstract but endowed with spirit. At least the spirit of the times. Because even if the artist came from a totally different social reality and did not feel a part of the local society, he was still able to dazzle with the modesty, fragility and composition of these pieces.
Shortly afterwards, he started to divide his time between New York and Lima. Klutier´s sculptures from this period grew in scale, turning from these small organic compositions into more complex forms. The Riders series is like an enormous explosion of the strength that nestled in the fragility of his former work. Powerful geometrical forms in welded metal, like strange instruments suspended in the air by pulleys and cables.
Acrobatic aerial fixtures, balancing precisely above the viewers´ heads. They are works that play with weight and weightlessness, instruments and their uselessness. “The moment of balance in which it seems that things weigh nothing”, says Klutier.
He exhibited these pieces at the Aele gallery In Madrid (1988) and then at the Artline Gallery (1989) in The Hague. These impressive pieces had an impact and as a result, he was commissioned by the architects Lucas & Ellerman to produce two piece for the lobby of the Tiel- Utrecht Insurance Company building. Blue Rider, 6 metres long and weighing 590 kilos, was suspended at a height of 12 metres, while Yellow Rider, at 3 metres long and weighing 272 kg, hung at a height of 5 metres. In 1991, he created another Rider for the entrance of the Frits Philips Music Centre In Eindhoven. He also presented his sculptures in New York and started to earn recognition. In 1994, he was awarded a scholarship in the Pollock Krasner Foundation of New York and had an Important exhibition at the Kranner Art Museum in Champaign, Illinois (U.S.A) with another series of Floaters. There are also pieces from the ´90´s that combine metal with wooden structures.
In Holland, before going to Peru, Klutier had already made sculptures. Above all a series of chairs that entwined their legs or touched one another with them, in the way that one might secretly brush toes under the table with someone who ignites attraction. Later on, and also in his country, he started to build lineal sculptures that were like metallic drawings in the air, with figures, wheels and stairways and childish or playful air about them. “The basis of my painting is drawing. I am a draughtsman. Everything I do begins with the linear form”. And In effect, there is a fluidity, a musicality that is very much connected to improvisation both in his paintings and his sculpture. An improvisation that appears, just as in jazz, from a deep learning combined with Intuition. A liquid poesy. A continuity, one same style evident throughout.
In Peru, his works reflected a shift from the intellectual to the Intuitive or emotional, the search for an continuous flow. Painting and sculpture go hand in hand in Klutier's work. “Painting for me is imagining that which does not exist, something that appears out of the invisible”. And he is never completely satisfied, something that motivates him to continue. “The Intellectual helps you to develop certain ideas but the time comes when you come across obstacles, you get blocked, you come to a dead end”, he explains. “If you open up to emotion, you can let yourself be carried away by life-force energies and strength”. In Peru, I discovered what I hadn't been able to discover in Europe. The way I expressed myself changed in a complementary manner.'
In this line, one is able to discover one of the artist's most original and ambitious projects: his domes. Here, the architecture of the domes houses within it surprising mural paintings that allude to a continuum of the mind and the imagination, where the kingdom of its hybrid beings wraps the viewer in a circular dream and there is a glimmer of sky that seeps in from the domed roof. The project aims to complete seven domes In different parts of the planet. Six murals are already complete, 2 domes in Peru and one that is in process in Holland: Maya de Multitud (2007) at Pulpos, a beach close to Lima; Nacido para brillar (2011) for the Fundación Niños del Arcoiris In Urubamba; Primal Dream (2012), Feeding a Dream Bear (2015), From a Star Brighter Than The Sun (2017), Look, I see nothing (2020) also at Pulpos and the seventh which will be installed in Holland
Klutier is water and flowing lines, and he is also metal. He had an early apprenticeship at a welding factory which, in his own words was a bad experience and left not impression on his work, although he did learn to weld, cut and bend different types of metal. In recent years he has shifted to using aluminium in his sculptures. His handmade models made of cardboard, aluminium foil or any other material is then scanned or printed in 3D. With this small model, he goes to the factory where it is built. “I like metals in their natural state, like cut steel, which acquires a patina as it starts to rust, although this is a little complicated. And I also want nothing to do with fire and casting part. Everything gets damaged by the damp in Lima. That's why I chose aluminium which is lighter and more resistant. I tend to paint it a colour both to protect it and to give it character.'
One of his biggest sculptures, Birdy, which is almost five metres high, found its setting at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, MAC-Lima, in Barranco. It was installed here for the exhibition, Reflejos del Camino, in 2017, made up of 38 large format paintings, including a circular piece similar to the murals of his domes. Birdy is now installed permanently in the park that surrounds the museum. Klutier has had over 40 exhibitions in Holland, the United Stated, Peru, Chile and Mexico.
He is about to install another of his sculptures in the Parque de la Reserva, among the impressive fountains of the Circuito Mágico del Agua (Magical Water Circuit). It is one of his monumental 'puppy dog' pieces and will be called Kaila, after his granddaughter's pet. “It is my dream to install my sculptures in public spaces, something that makes its presence felt. What I want to do most of all is make a sculpture that produces the sound of the wind”.
The most recent sculptures are somehow like ribbons that are tossed into flight, becoming entangled in themselves. Abstract three-dimensional forms that conjure up creatures, as though cut out from his paintings.
“If you want realism, you have photography. I don’t feel the need to be a realist. Deforming things gives them a new life, you acquire a certain vitality. Nature is an Incredible source, but I don’t see the point in duplicating it.'
Despite four decades in Peru, Klutier is a rootless wanderer. He has connected with what he sees but not with the country's culture. He immerses in his surroundings through travels and journeys, more inclined to the countryside than the city.
He draws every day. It could be that that same unending and surprising line is like the invisible life line.