C O U Z I J N V A N L E E U W E N
Centraal Museum Utrecht, gate 2 0 1 6
' A new garden, a new gate '
~ Autumn 2015 ~
Recent months Couzijn van Leeuwen worked in two places simultaneously. morning from 7 to 10 am at the studio in Driebergen and then into the car to Tilburg: working until the sun goes down in the forge.
The reason for this daily trip is the following: Centraal Museum Utrecht invited Couzijn to think about and design a new gate that provides access to the totally renewed Museum Garden.
This area with a certain historical load, that we come to speak about later,is entirely accessible to the public. Public access in this context means also closing during the night hours. So a gate is certainly required.
Sketch designs: luxuriantly growing parts with a floral character creating the gate.
In this dense impenetrable iron vegetation teeming with objects, without exception objects that do have a direct relationship with the concept of 'gardening', shovels, scythes, fences, rakes and even a wheelbarrow, flat compressed, on the spot held by rampant iron vegetation.
The work is nearing completion. For this work Couzijn used an adjustable torsion bench and a self-built power hammer, which pay tribute to Janis Aarnoutse, the blacksmith, who also changed all the wooden parts of the supplied tools and copied them in iron.
Placement and completion of this work: March 2016.