Everything is temporary, however beautiful - exhibition Iris Le Rütte at Statues by the Sea

Last spring, while on the patio of museum Beelden aan Zee, I saw the newly installed sculpture by Catinka Kersten viewed, the image caught my eye Daphne By Iris Le Rütte. A woman who instead of a head and arms stretched branches to the sky. It is a scene from the Metamorphoses by Ovid: the nymph Daphne, fleeing from the infatuated god Apollo, turns into a laurel tree. The god prevails and weaves a wreath of laurel leaf - the laurel wreath.

Later that afternoon, I drove by car down a street with trees on either side. Old trees with a history and young planting trees, all still without leaves. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw enchanted nymphs stretching their branches all around me.

Looking through another's eye

Now it is autumn and I am sitting next to Iris Le Rütte on a sofa she designed in museum Beelden aan Zee, where one of the four winter exhibitions is dedicated to her work. Le Rütte (1960) is known for her sculptures for awards and especially for her works in public spaces. These range from three enormous dromedaries on a railway viaduct to a 'floating' bronze drapery held up by two hands, on which you can sit as if on a bench. Often the sculptures evoke an alienating, wistful feeling.

She is happy when I tell her my experience with Daphne say. 'That's exactly what I aim for - that by looking at art you start to see more in the outside world, that you look at it through someone else's eye.' In the exhibition, this idea also takes concrete form as some of her poems and drawings are affixed to the glass windows - a filter for the view of the terraces and the sea.

Image to Starfish

Le Rütte's shared history with Beelden aan Zee begins years ago with her letter to the museum's founder, collector Theo Scholten. 'I wrote to him that I liked the museum so much. He responded; it turned out that one of my first works for public spaces was in his native village. Then director Jan Teeuwisse came to my studio and bought a work of mine.'

It led to now two solo exhibitions and a second purchase, the Daphne. Le Rütte also made several small sculptures for Beelden aan Zee, including the Image to Starfish, a present for the many volunteers on the 15th anniversary. 'They are three starfish with five arms each. That way I could represent the fifteen without putting a number on it.' Museum sponsors receive a figurine of a hand holding a ginkgo leaf, symbolising eternity.

Variations on the Daphne play a major role in this second exhibition, Shaded area named. Women/trees of different shapes and sizes and with different titles should form a 'mythical forest' in a vault-like space in the museum, which is buried in the Scheveningen dune. Le Rütte: 'I am very happy that the museum is giving me the opportunity to show how my development has continued since the first exhibition.'

She depicted more metamorphoses, such as that of the hunter Actaeon, who was turned into a deer by the goddess Diana because he had seen her bathing. His own dogs no longer recognised him and tore him apart. The fascination with Ovid is obvious: 'My work very often consists of two parts that merge into each other: thing into animal, man into tree... I want to use it to show that everything belongs together and can merge. It is also a bit like Aristotle's old idea that everything turns to dust and then comes back, can be built up into something new. For me, it's always about impermanence and love, fate, the unattainable. It is often a struggle for artists not to depict the vanitas theme in a clichéd way. How do you make sure you don't fall into just the symbolism of skeletons and butterflies? I know the problem.'

Lovely and grim

Special combinations can also be seen in the drawings: something that is half drone and half bird, or the silhouette of a girl with balloons that on closer inspection turns out to be the famous photo of the 'napalm girl' from Vietnam. Lovely and grim always go hand in hand. Recently, Le Rütte published the collection 'Ik dicht je bij me', in which she juxtaposes drawings and poems. But they are not illustrations! They do have something to do with each other, or they rub together a bit.' She previously published a collection together with poet Leo Vroman: she the drawings, he the poems.

Anyone thinking that Le Rütte, as a sculptor, 'just does a bit of drawing on the side' is mistaken: 'I have a background in drawing. For a long time I mainly drew and painted, only later did I start making sculptures. My sculptures are actually three-dimensional drawings.' At the silhouetted Daphnes it is easy to see that.

It is striking that they all raise themselves up on their toes, like ballet dancers. 'They are looking for balance. I actually work opposite to classical sculpture, like Michelangelo's, in whose sculptures the centre of gravity is near the ground: the weight always goes up in my sculptures.'

That precarious balance still sometimes clashes with the unruly practice of working for public space. One of the Daphnes, Forgotten Memory, standing on the toes of one foot. How do you make sure it doesn't fall over? Most difficult for her was the committee, which had to assess whether a table with three hares leaning on it as legs was safe for children. The guidelines seemed unrelenting. 'Officials were afraid children could fall off, or get stuck between the ears,' she said. Until another official decided that it was not playground equipment, but a work of art. And no child has ever fallen off.'

Still, a word about that striving upwards. Some sculptures have wings made of maple seeds. Le Rütte: 'A maple seed is potentially a whole tree. So when you give that as a gift, you actually give a tree. At the same time, it is also perishable, it can end up well but also perish. You immortalise it by casting it in bronze. It is a reminder that everything that is there is only temporary, no matter how beautiful.'

 

Iris Le Rütte. Shaded area can be seen from 30.10.15 to 7.2.16.

 

Discussed books

• 'Schaduwplaats', oeuvre catalogue accompanying the exhibition at museum Beelden aan Zee, Publisher Erven J. Bijleveld
• 'I close you to me', book of drawings and poems by Iris Le Rütte, Publisher 99 Publishers
• 'The most beautiful poems' by Leo Vroman with drawings by Iris Le Rütte. Published in the 'Hollands Maandblad series', publisher Nieuw Amsterdam.