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The Passage
Artist Navid Nuur (1976)
Title The Passage
Year 2017
Material Digital print on emergency blanket
About the work This work shows the entrance to a cave. We often think of caves as scary, oppressive places, but this work, printed on an emergency blanket, reminds us that caves have also traditionally been places of protection from rain, cold and wind. Moreover, new images and ideas can emerge in the dark. Indeed, cave drawings are the earliest works of art we know.
About the artist Navid Nuur started out as a graphic designer, but later switched to visual arts. He works with surprising, often everyday materials and techniques, which he carefully chooses in relation to the themes he explores in his work. His starting point is often a seemingly simple proposition, such as how we look at a coloured surface or how ink seeps through a stack of post-its. He then converts these propositions into poetic installations, drawings, sculptures or interventions in (public) space. Nuur studied at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Utrecht, the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and the University of Plymouth in England. Nuur lives and works in The Hague.
In the collection De Nederlandsche Bank acquired nine works by Navid Nuur between 2011 and 2017. Like Jan Andriesse, another artist whose work is in the collection, Nuur is interested in natural phenomena such as light and water. Unlike Andriesse, Nuur does not try to represent these phenomena with paint, but creates artworks that challenge you to think about your relationship to these manifestations of nature.
