Nummer zes

Nummer zes, Steinway grand piano, wake me up to go to sleep and all the color of the rainbow.
17’09”, 35mm, Amsterdam NL, 2006

Public collections:
– De Hallen, Haarlem
– van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
– Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM), Torino

Tom Morton on Nummer zes:
Nummer Zes is about desire and scale, about the things we wish for feeling too big for our wallets, homes, or hearts. The artist pursues the piano, but he can never quite possess it, only play upon its keys. The film suggests a wider contemporary cultural malaise, in which the grand emotions experienced seemingly so easily by the 19th century Romantics seem impossible to access in our own age for more than a few fleeting moments. And yet, van der Werve still searches them out, because, really, what else is he to do? He has said that ‘I think most artists have a way of finding their own reality, and in my case it happened to be [19th Century] Romanticism. I’m sure that if I would have lived in that time I would have been just as miserable as now’. This, I suspect, is the true punch-line of Nummer Zes’ black joke: you can change the scenography, but you can’t change yourself. All you can hope for is rainbows in unexpected places, or cosmoses opening up on your cheap lino floor.