Lucas Hoeben is a collaboration of Karla Hoeben and Martijn Lucas Smit. Lucas Hoeben describes and includes the landscape of art. He analyses the scenery of art, explores the system, eliminates the details and reproduces its manifestations. Eventually Lucas Hoeben aims to play a game of displacement and appropriation and wants to take the challenge of changing contexts.
Lucas Hoeben portrays all entities of art ; artists, sculptures, museums, performances, print work about art and trivialities. In the trivialities series Lucas Hoeben explores objects in art institutions that are not objects of art as such, for instance a display case.
The choice of the specific topics to be portrayed within an entity (which artist, which sculpture or which print work) is mostly based on personal preference and can be arbitrary. A visual occurrence in daily live can lead to a choice for a specific topic as well as a long lasting admiration or a strong unexpected art experience. One can say the personal baggage of collected (always positive) impressions is the ground for a choice for an artwork to be made and portrayed.
For a specific topic Lucas looks for a depicted version on the internet, in books or in publications. He then copies the accurate outline on a piece of paper. The precise definition of the contour of a subject is the main starting point of a portrayed piece.
As drawing is the basic technique and the technique of choice to study objects and analyze structures in art, each category of the Lucas Hoeben project contains drawings. The drawings are made by scratching the entire surface within a chosen contour with graphite pencil on paper.
A defined contour however can also lead to three dimensional pieces and to various techniques that are used in the project. These techniques range from pouring to molding or building and from photography to animation. The choice of the materials or techniques is based on a combination of conventions, intuitions or associations around the specific category. In the portrayed sculpture category, for instance, Lucas Hoeben made plaster sculptures because plaster has been used to reproduce sculptures since ancient times as a means to study and expose sculptures.
In an exhibition the works itself represent artworks or refer, to art but the exhibition itself is also a work. A work that combines time and art movements but still shows in its representation the same appearance in every category.
Often Lucas Hoeben invites other artists to join a show. Sometimes their works are incorporated in the theme of the Lucas Hoeben show like in Collect! (see “exhibitions” 2015) and sometimes the artists are asked to react or even rule over the Lucas Hoeben show like in 37PK with Toon Teken, Andre Pielage, Eva Pel.
Since 2017 Lucas Hoeben works in cooperation with Eric Martijn on a project called ROKOKO. As Lucas Hoeben plays with contexts and conventions in art as well as authenticity and reproduction he thought it was appropriate to add a second party to agitate and challenge the art practice even more. We made a communal booth at This Art Fair, an art fair in De Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam, and more shows followed. Another example of a collaboration is a performance made with Joost Nelissen, a musician/composer. For this performance Nelissen built a program which interacts with the animations of Lucas Hoeben (see “exhibitions” 2018). In 2020 Lucas Hoeben started a collaboration with artist/artistic researcher Eva Pel. This collaboration is a project based upon the legacy of Seth Siegelaub’s live and work. Besides the collaborations Hoeben always participates in exhibitions curated by others or by himself.