Hilly van Eerten

Rhythm of the Modern City in the Netherlands
in print art in collage - digital color prints

by Jan Homacher

It is a pleasure to think and write about the urban collage print art of artist Hilly van Eerten. Especially because the life of people in the contemporary town centers of Dutch big cities like Rotterdam, The Hague and Amsterdam has become so clearly present in her print art of recent years. So I see her art as a report in images of peoples life in the Dutch big city. And her characteristic visual language has become the digital collage design in color-print.

I really love the big cities in The Netherlands with all their diversity of visual languages. I have gradually become a real city animal as a local of Amsterdam. I really enjoy living on the edge of the old city myself, with a view of modern Amsterdam at the Oosterdok and along the IJ.

Hilly van Eerten’s print machine runs on the many fragments from her photos about life of people in the modern city. These pictures provides the visual language for all her collage art in color. Her growing photo archive can be seen as a long-term record of urban life in the contemporary mixture of old & modern architecture of the major cities in the Netherlands.

It is mainly from her many looks and photo shots - there in the city streets that afterwards a different, mixed urban reality emerges in her collage of selected images. She distillates this new reality from the photos she has taken on the spot in town. In this way, she creates a modern print art of the city, by creating and interweaving all kinds of relationships between the images she selected. You see everywhere overlaps and shifts and points of contact between the pieces of photo that she uses in her definite digital collage in color.

The collage print art of the Dutch towns is an old art tradition that already Jacob Maris, for example, applied in his many Dutch cityscapes in the late 18th century. He also mixed details of Dutch cities into one definite print, painting or drawing and he loved his freedom.

In this way of creating, Hilly van Eerten offers us modern ways of looking that she receives from the city in which she is wandering and watching.
When I look at her collage print, I often think of another Dutch painter Breitner, who did the same when he photographed the new city expansions and the many construction pits in Amsterdam around 1900. Hilly van Eerten choose the same subject for several years, but the modern city with the whole world have changed considerably in the meantime.

The wet, reflecting street pavement around the old Damrak in Amsterdam old town were a favourite subject for artists like Breitner and Isaac Israels, under the gas lamp light. Also the then modern shop windows with the first electric lights fascinated them strongly. Nowadays we see steamed-up double-glazed windows of the shops, or through the tram windows that reflect the shops lights in all kinds of distorted reflections.
I also love the modern reflective glass walls in the new architecture design, which reflect all kinds of moving things and walking people - all day long. It is spread out before our eyes for everyone who walks in the city. But Hilly van Eerten looks at it again at home for a long time, and makes her own selections.

So Hilly van Eerten is first and foremost a viewer and spectator of the modern face of the Dutch big city nowadays. In doing so, she has become a visual reporter of our own modern life in the city as a collage artist. She finds her visual material also in all kinds of new construction situations, station construction and recent architecture design, especially in the large cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague.
These three cities are modernizing rapidly, especially in and around the city center. She teaches her eyes to learn from these daily mirrors and visual hustle and bustle around us, when we walk there. Only after she has experienced the impressions herself, she can start making her own digital collage in different layers, in which modern architecture design always forms one essential layer.

By cutting, interweaving and combining her photo images, mixing them and setting them against each other. Because that is where the characteristic of her collage art in color printing lies: in the montage & disassembly, the collage and the décollage of her own overwhelming amount of photo material of the city.

Her graphic representations of the Dutch city with its modern architecture design offer us as visitors and lookers all kinds of different ways of watching. It is a way of looking that we unconsciously apply ourselves every day, but hardly know how to experience this consciously - it just happens. The way Hilly van Eerten looks, we have never really looked around the city - with those accompanying storms of fleeting modern images and impressions that want to visit our eyes so eagerly.

There is truly a radically new element of looking in her art of digital collages in color. Her print art shows us the modern times with all its diversity in layers, reflections, views and transparencies in a conscious way. She learns her visual 'tricks' from daily reality around her, from life in the streets in the mixture modern and the old Dutch city.

J. Homacher