Jaski Gallery
Studio Job led by artist Job Smeets presents a new show at Jaski Gallery of rare and unusual works in a new partnership with the Amsterdam gallery. This will be the Dutch artist’s first show in the city for over a decade and the first show with renowned gallery Jaski. Several pieces have travelled directly from Job Smeets’s critically acclaimed show ‘Forever Endeavour’ at Museum W, The Netherlands. With works spanning much of Smeets’s 25 years since the studio was founded, this new exhibition aims to captivate the spirit of the retrospective, with many additional pieces available publicly for the first time in this unusual and highly personal show.
All the pieces are small-scale personal favourites from the Belgian/Dutch artist, all handmade in the Studio Job atelier in The Netherlands, with select works from many famous collections of the artist as well as unique pieces and drawings. Highlights include the rare complete Still Life gold collection (Groningen Museum) and the life-size bronze Wolf sculpture (Museum W). Also presented is a new Studio Job adaptation of the classic ‘Allen’ Frank Lloyd Wright table exclusively created for the exhibition.
The Concept
A show that Job Smeets describes as “off-beat and unusual works that don’t fit in a collection”, the small and medium-scale works are connected by their provenance from museum exhibitions and include some of the artists’ personal projects. As the Studio Job atelier hand-crafts all of its’ bronze works in-house, based on the surreal ideas of Smeets, many pieces are created as unique works based on an idea of Smeets’s that he explains “often feel compelled to make”.
Jaski Gallery’s founder Robbert van Ham was inspired to re-create the spirit of Job Smeets’ highly personal retrospective ‘Forever Endeavour’ last year, in his own Amsterdam gallery, he explains; “After seeing the Studio Job exhibition at Museum W, I knew for sure the fantastic works of Studio Job and Jaski would be a great match. Job Smeets is a great addition to our gallery. We are looking forward to showing Job’s NEVER exhibition to the Amsterdam audience.”
The Details
Select pieces that are all available to purchase for the first time, have been curated for this unique show.
“I want to re-create that feeling from Forever Endeavour in a more contemporary gallery setting. To really see the craft and the details of each work up-close” explains Smeets. Some early pieces include Sickle, Craft, (2001) and Farm Furniture, (2008) first exhibited in Milan then Groninger Museum. Exhibited are a selection of unique framed drawings spanning two decades of the studios work. Never-before-seen bronze works such as Sandbag (2019), Ming (2019) hand-painted vase, and Stewpan (2020) an overscaled pressure cooker, are shown alongside museum pieces such as the Amsterdam Chair (2016) from the Maxxi museum, Rome and the rare gold version of the highly sought-after Still Life ceramic collection (2006). The gravity-defying Streetlamp (2018) cast bronze, bowed lantern will be on show, a bold example of Smeets’s surrealist style. (see pack for images)
The show follows on from a series of large-scale Amsterdam-based projects for the studio; Hers a public bronze four-metre sculpture of his partners’ hand was unveiled in 2022 in Amsterdam-Zuid, The Rose House a complete brick and rose bronze façade on the exclusive shopping street PC Hooftstraat completed in 2020, the globally acclaimed maximalist interior for fashion icon Rolf Snoeren, and the theatrical ticket booth sculpture B*llsh*t Circus stationed in the Museumplein for Moco Museum. 2023 marks the 25th anniversary of Studio Job, and has since growing to over 25 people, been involved in over 400 shows, and becoming one of the largest single-artist ateliers in Europe.
