In the Studio: Joep van Lieshout

In the Studio: Joep van Lieshout

© Atelier van Lieshout

Van Lieshout, center, at work on a window

Lard Buurman

The artist at work in the living room of his apartment, located above his painting studio

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"I have a lot more ideas than I can possibly execute,” declares Joep van Lieshout. Tall, with a piercing gaze and an eyebrow perpetually arched above frameless glasses, the creative force behind the art-design-architecture collective Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL) is an intimidating presence. The 44-year-old Netherlands-born van Lieshout is seated in a small rectangle of an office at his studio complex on the Rotterdam waterfront where I have come to meet him and try to understand his often-outrageous work. His understated wool jacket and button-down ensemble is enlivened by colorful, slightly irreverent touches—a red bead necklace and a pair of wingtip shoes in vivid green suede.

A few assistants work quietly at computers nearby, but most of the labor is happening downstairs, in the main studio, where the sculptures, architectural projects and furniture, all designed by van Lieshout, are produced. “I always start out doing drawings,” he says, “and when I like something and the form keeps coming back to me, even if it’s something ugly or a little bit deviant, my inner voice says I have to do it. So I say, ‘Let’s make it.’ ”

What does “deviant” look like? Since 1995, AVL has realized artworks that skirt the borders of good taste—designs for elaborate
brothels; a vividly illustrated how-to manual on at-home pig slaughter—and legality: a handmade gun that sports brass knuckles. With every project, van Lieshout seems to confound distinctions between design and art, dwelling and sculpture.

Using wood, metal and the occasional shipping container but most frequently colored, molded fiberglass—“it stays beautiful for at least 100 years”—van Lieshout has created customized RV-like dwellings on wheels; small portable annexes, called clipons, that can be attached to existing structures (in 1997 one was bolted to the exterior of the Centraal Museum Utrecht); modular bathroom, kitchen and living units; roomlike spaces in the forms of wombs, skulls and other bodily cavities, including the nearly 54-foot-long Bar Rectum, a saloon in the form of a human digestive tract painted bloodred; and ecoconscious composting toilets that could conceivably convert waste into fuel.

Many of these “conceptual sculptures,” as he terms them, are meant to be used, while some others, such as a bomb- and weaponsmaking facility, are potentially functional but untested. And some—large-scale anatomical models of female and male reproductive organs—are outside the realm of the practical altogether. In addition to building structures and furniture, “I also make sculptures and paintings about daily life,” he tells me. “I don’t like borders—or morality.”

A libertine, perhaps, but one who has found a way to make the system work for him: Van Lieshout estimates that nearly half his projects are commissions for institutions—his work is in the collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, in New York; the Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam; and the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis—and for private clients, most of whom are European. AVL has also done office interiors for several businesses, including a Belgian fashion company and a Dutch insurance firm. Among the smaller-scale fiberglass pieces that can be commissioned from AVL are bathroom and kitchen units, starting at around $70,000, and tables, which run $20,000 and up.

Van Lieshout now has about 20 people working with him, but when he started out, in the 1980s, he was on his own. After studying at the Academy of Modern Art in Rotterdam and the Villa Arson, in Nice, and completing a residency at Ateliers 63, in Haarlem, “I was making these halfway forms, utilitarian objects that were also sculpture,” he says. “What I was doing was not very popular.”

In the late ’80s, he began arranging beer crates and concrete blocks in Minimalist-inspired stacks and then made modular furniture and boxlike sinks, tubs and toilets, which he presented in his first solo show, in 1988 at Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam. These modestly scaled early efforts are the foundation of AVL’s predominantly straightforward, even primitive, aesthetic—there are never more features than absolutely necessary. With its emphasis on efficiency and portability, his work brings to mind Andrea Zittel’s Living Units—trunks that open and unfold into full-size rooms—but at its most functional, his output most readily suggests that of his Dutch forebear Gerrit Rietveld, whose ultrasimple plywood-and-bolts De Stijl designs are more sculpture than furniture and whom van Lieshout cites as an early influence. As for contemporary Dutch design, “it’s too easy,” he says. “It’s not conceptual enough. An artwork should be a little bit unexplainable.” By the 1990s, the scale of his works had increased, and so had the number of commissions. At one point, someone called up and asked if he needed an intern. The studio grew from there.