Bart Drost

In 'gold leaf boys Part  II' Drost continues the theme in the Sen Lin Mu project from 2017. He then took roughly 150 photos of the canopy of three acacia trees to be felled. At the beginning of 2021, he drew 139 of these photos in his own way, with pencil on Nepalese paper. Drost surprised himself with this: how many ways of expression can you represent with a pencil drawing?

Drost adds some 'old work' to this presentation at De Nieuwe Gang, including six photographic works that he showed at Artis in Den Bosch in 1991 and which he radically edited for this exhibition.

139 color photos became 139 drawings.

Parallel to the exhibition in De Nieuwe Gang, there is an exhibition by Drost at POPOP in Nijmegen. The main component there is formed by a triptych and a photo book with hundreds of gold-painted photos.

In De Nieuwe Gang, Drost shows a series of photos that he showed at his previous exhibition there in 1992 during his presentation  'Ode aan de Betuwe in bloei en andere verhalen'. At that time the photos had not yet been edited and they hung separately from each other on the wall.

Bart Drost published an edition as a catalog for his first public exhibition 'Ode to the Betuwe in bloom and other stories' in 1982. This includes a number of drawings from his 1979 internship diary and a number of homoerotic poems from existing literature.

On the occasion of Bladgoudjongens Part II, he has made a second version of this 'by way of catalogue', which includes a number of poems from his own hand and drawings from the exhibition.

Bart Drost copied about 150 photos of foliage. It became 'a project'. And he wanted to show that project. In a proper way. So all the drawings were framed. How to do this without incurring too high a cost? He found affordable and appropriate lists at the Action store chain. Because this company does not guarantee unbridled delivery, Drost traveled all over the country to be able to purchase all 150 frames in the shortest possible time. Friends helped him with this, because you can't cycle everywhere after all. A photo was taken of every Action and with surprise it was found that the Action is really everywhere!

Gold Leaf Boys Part II is part of a triptych.

Part I & Part III were shown at POPOP-ART in Nijmegen.

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