Dutch Designer Maarten Baas on His Fascination With Time, Acquiring His First Banksy, and Making Handbag-Eating Monsters
By
Artnet
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27th February 2023
Baas has a new show of imaginative clocks at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Los Angeles.
Maarten Baas is enthralled by time: pausing it, fast-forwarding it, drawing it, performing it. The conceptualization of time has been his modus operandi since 2009, when the Dutch designer exhibited his smash-hit “Real Time” at Salone del Mobile in Milan and earned the title Designer of the Year from Design Basel in Miami.
Ever since, Baas has been crafting horological works out of the fourth dimension; and naturally, he has a lot of clocks to show for it. Sweepers Clock (2010) is a 12-hour video in which two men busily sweep piles of trash resembling the hands of a clock, treating time as a performative process. Those wondering who the enigmatic figure painting each passing minute from the inside of Schiphol Clock (2016) in Amsterdam’s bustling airport—it was Baas.
In 2017, Baas opened his first major museum show, “Hide & Seek,” at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, his pieces have been scooped up by institutions all over the world, from MoMA in New York and San Francisco MoMA to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Two grandfather clocks of his—or rather, one grandmother clock—have fetched his highest auction amounts, at Sotheby’s (2019) and Phillips (2012).
Now, Baas is exhibiting “Play Time” at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Los Angeles (through May 26), a time-traveling retrospective of earlier time-based works mixed with new iterations. In his “720 Minutes Clocks” series, Baas gathered as many Dutch children to create a colorful drawing on a clock’s face. In Real Time XL The Artist, Baas stands inside a giant clock, hand-drawing and redrawing its hands.