Exhibition - Nancy Scheffer van Overveldt
Title: Discovering new facets
Subtitle: Unknown drawings and paintings - Nancy Scheffer van Overveldt
Open to public fromTuesday till Sunday 10:00am-17:00pm
The Hague, Netherlands
Already in her early youth and adolescence, Nancy van Overveldt (1930-2015) shows great talent and creativity in visual arts. Her illustrations and stories won prizes and in recognition of her talent and potential, she was accepted at the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. These drawings mark the beginning of a successful artistic career. In 1951, eager to refine her painting techniques and further explore colour, she enrolled in the ‘Académie André Lhôte in Paris.
The majority of the drawings has neither a reference nor a title written by the artist herself, as they are also not dated, but due to the style they reflect and the coherence of her work in relation to her personal history, it is very probable that they were made in the period between 1943 and 1946, when Nancy was 13 to 16 years old, and lived with her parents and sister in Wassenaar, the Netherlands. It was a period when she used to sign her work with her paternal surname: “Scheffer”.
The drawings that are presented in this exhibition are unique pieces, since they speak about the personal life and interests of Nancy, long before becoming a professional artist. That in the process decides to change her artist’s name to “Nancy van Overveldt”, her maternal surname, by which she signs her work from then on. Always inspired by her context and experiences of her surroundings, some of the drawings speak to us about the post-war atmosphere in the Netherlands. An interesting detail in some of the drawings are the dark-skinned figures, with a Mediterranean expression as a reference or a premonition of a world, that without knowing it, Nancy would discover and love till the end of her life: Mexico.
During the 26 years that she lived in Mexico, Nancy merged with the artistic movement of the time, muralists such as, Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera, and getting to know great sculptors like Angela Gurria and Mathias Goeritz. She succeeds in positioning herself in the artistic world of Mexico, exhibiting her work in renown art houses as the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Galería Antonio Souza, Galería Chapultepec, and also being part of and member for more than 40 years of the artistic group of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana. Recently, works of Nancy have been re-discovered, that were sold in the early 50’s in the U.S and illustrate magic realism, compositions of impressionistic figures in purely Mexican scenes.
Nancy returns to the Netherlands in the early seventies back to the world where she grew up, and in contrast to everything she saw and lived in Mexico, she uses her new experiences to portray the Dutch landscape. Representations full of dynamism and movement. The elements water, fire and wind make their appearance on the canvas, like metaphors relating the movements the artist, Nancy van Overveldt, was transgressing. In these paintings we see canvases full of color, but with clear expression towards the transformative. Forms merge into others, typically clouds, horsemen, horses and bulls. Often packs of birds appear to fly out of the canvas.
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