Erris Huigens
Anti-Monuments
21.12.25-20.01.26
These sculptures do not ask for attention, do not seek to be understood, do not offer themselves. They stand. Their mere presence unsettles the implicit order of their surroundings: they create friction. As mute and immovable presences, they pose a question about art itself: can art exist without an audience, without context, without narrative?
Here, form is not the message, collision is. Each block is a rupture in the continuity of the landscape. Concrete, the material of foundations, of the unseen, becomes a visible obstacle. The work does not seduce, embellish, or celebrate. It interrupts. It is sculpture as stumbling block.
These objects waver between sculpture and architecture, between modularity and intrusion. They echo a minimalist grammar, but without nostalgia. They are anti-monuments, anti-landmarks. Their aesthetic is one of refusal: a refusal of meaning, of function, of welcome.
In their sudden, anti-narrative appearance, these sculptures act as thresholds: neither fully public nor fully invisible, neither monumental nor utilitarian. It is precisely this ambiguity that generates meaning: the object asserts itself as a problem. It doesn’t decorate, resolve, or explain. It merely occupies space.
In this practice, Huigens does not merely build structures, he builds conditions. Sculpture becomes a vehicle for a broader inquiry: what does it mean to place something in space? What kind of reading is triggered by mere presence? And above all, how long can a sculptural gesture endure before it is reabsorbed by the landscape or forgotten?
These works do not ask to be seen. But they demand reflection on what we call visible.