Gezicht op gebouwen c. 1828 - 1897

Curator: This sketch is titled “Gezicht op gebouwen,” or “View of Buildings,” attributed to Adrianus Eversen, and likely created sometime between 1828 and 1897. It's rendered in pencil on paper. Editor: It feels more like an idea of buildings, an architect’s daydream. It's just lines suggesting forms; provisional, somehow. The texture of the paper really becomes part of it. Curator: I think that sense of immediacy and incompletion is deliberate, pointing towards shifts in the period regarding urbanization, industrialisation, and its reflection on city representation. It invites viewers to participate, doesn’t it, filling in the blanks in this sketched cityscape? Editor: Absolutely. The rawness makes you think about the hand of the artist and the whole history of pencil production: the graphite mining, the milling, the wood, the paper manufacturing processes. The labour is almost laid bare. Curator: Eversen existed in a very specific moment of transition when ideas about cities shifted dramatically. Did you see it more like utopian view or criticism of growing urban landscape? The choice of subject of "buildings" points to what the public valued and wanted to look at. Editor: Well, it could be both, couldn't it? On one hand, celebrating the development of city spaces. Yet, the simplicity hints at how built spaces reduce all material and work down to minimal sketches. I see critique about rapid production processes embedded in the materiality itself. Curator: True, art also participates in how people negotiate what becomes valuable. The sketches suggest an artist searching for order in an expanding world, making us appreciate both the ambition and ambiguity inherent to visualizing modernity. Editor: Right. What really resonates with me is that you can literally see the thinking process. Pencil lets you get these layers of potential at once. Almost like fossilized record from the era of rapidly changing processes, with its own specific material agency. Curator: The pencil marks themselves seem to invite more thoughts regarding its value or function. Perhaps its the city in transition or transformation, that could inspire other emerging artists. Editor: And the way Eversen used a common instrument like the pencil offers all this complexity of interpretation around labour, social views or emerging urban settings. Wonderful.