In the depths of memory
Labyrinth of Memories
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Labyrinth of Memories
Labyrinth of memories. In six galleries with a total of 1000m2, visitors where able to stroll through Van Veluw's astonishing oeuvre – a journey capped off by his newest installation, an ‘obsessive’ and room-filling finale.
Levi van Veluw
Like much of Levi van Veluw’s work, the installations at Singer Laren are fully-staged ‘worlds’ that the viewer can enter. His work reflects tremendous power of imagination and is often made entirely by hand. It is therefore unsurprising that he is a favourite at Singer Laren. Museum director Jan Rudolph de Lorm: ‘Van Veluw’s work is unique and striking, in terms of both concept and execution. The end result displays a high degree of craft and refinement. We are extremely pleased to be devoting broad attention to this multidisciplinary artist in our fully renovated museum.
In Labyrinth of memories, Levi van Veluw presents a range of two and three-dimensional works, including five large installations. For this exhibition, and based on his intuition, Van Veluw has selected a number of highlights from the existing collection. By doing so, he has placed items from the museum’s collection in a new light and incorporated them into his own narrative.
In this monumental installation, spanning 156 square meters and taking over a year to complete, Van Veluw confronts us with an overwhelming architecture of repetition and decay. The gallery is transformed into a spiraling sanctuary, where thousands of meticulously arranged shelves gradually collapse into chaos—a suffocating avalanche of more than 1,500 sculpted heads.
Each head is a failed attempt at likeness, a cast-off echo of the self. What begins as an orderly archive of identity erodes into a scene of obsessive ruin. The visitor enters not merely an artwork, but a confrontation with mankind’s compulsions: our relentless pursuit of self-definition, our hunger for transcendence through art, faith, knowledge, legacy.
At the core of this labyrinth lies a deeper obsession: the pursuit of impossible perfection. In the round inner chamber, shelves ascend vertiginously, as if stretching into infinity—an architectural metaphor for unattainable ideals. This obsessive striving leaves a devastating trace. All around, the clay heads—modeled after the artist himself and subsequently rejected—become relics of failure, fragments of a self forever just out of reach.
The work becomes a monument not to the individual, but to our collective mania for meaning, structure, and control, even as they disintegrate under the weight of their own ambition.
Singer Prize 2024 This is the first time that a winner of the Singer Prize has been granted so much space within the museum. Levi van Veluw: ‘Along the way, a special chemistry emerged between Singer Laren and myself as an artist. What started out small has grown into an ambitious project. It took courage on the museum’s part to rearrange the schedule and free up six exhibition spaces, all without knowing exactly where we were headed.’
