Chaim van Luit / Grondstof

For Chaim van Luit, the physical quest is essentially the artwork. He collects exceptional traces of human, and sometimes animal, activity. He does this during sometimes years-long treasure hunts through the forests of the German Eifel region, marl caves in Limburg and cities and farm fields all over Europe. This leads to finds such as salt licks, licked by red deer, and scarce remelted Roman attributes. It also results in reinterpretations of traces, signs or sayings in the form of neon installations, paintings or sculptures. His graffiti background is palpable in Van Luit's sensitivity to traces and texts, as well as the way he explores without boundaries.

Clothing hooks

In and from the store window of the Glaspaleis, Van Luit presents a new installation. Partly based on his Heerlen background, he works on the basis of traces of the mining past and present. The installation is inspired by a storage system that was frequently used during the mining industry. In the various Limburg coal mines, clothing hooks on chains were in use. The clothing hooks hung in the bath room where each miner had his own clothing hook with a lock. From this, clothes were hung after changing clothes to then descend for labour at the coal face. This system was characteristic of efficient and mass-production-oriented mining.

For his version of this system, Van Luit chose to hang personal items on the hooks again. At local recycling company RD4, he collected garments and other accessories by colour together with employees of the company. Most of the discarded clothes are sold by container as raw material for other products. Chaim made the selection by colour to create a 30-metre-wide rainbow of fabric in the full width - and depth - of the store window. To this end, he designed a hanging system with 167 cords and hooks to hang the clothes.

From the more than six hundred garments Chaim selected, a varied picture of time and community emerges. Among the garments are Roda JC outfits, communion dresses, socks from the Emma shoe factory, carnival and gabber clothing, a jumper from the FNV Trade Union and even a pigeon-milking jacket. Each garment tells a personal and communal story. Together, they form a floating rainbow weave of fabric in which the region's past and present are strung together; a temporary uniform in rainbow motif.

About Chaim van Luit

Chaim van Luit was born in Heerlen in 1985. He graduated from the Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts and Design in 2011. From 2013 to 2015, he was artist in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. In the past Chaim has held solo exhibitions, for example in Kasteel Wijlre, Wijlre (2020, NL), Meessen de Clercq, Brussels (2022, 2018, B), P////////AKT, Amsterdam (2014, NL) and Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (2013, NL). As well as a number of works held in the SCHUNCK collection, Van Luit’s art is represented in public and private collections at home and abroad.