Johannes Genemans (1942, Leiden, Holland) is a multifaceted artist. Since childhood, he’s acknowledged and nurtured an artistic vocation, starting as a designer and developing as a sculptor. He began his professional career by elegantly standing out as a refined stylist in the Made in Italy fashion industry. At the end of the Seventies and the beginning of the Eighties, his innovative footwear designs started to be admired worldwide.
Recognisable under the prestigious Opanka and Arco Sports brands, his models seduced the demanding and sophisticated tastes of Europe’s most prestigious clientele. In the early Nineties, however, he bid farewell to the world of fashion styling, selling his commercial and industrial company to devote himself fully to the ancient and genuine fascination of art, particularly sculpture, an ardent passion that had motivated him since childhood.
In 2000, he created his own artistic style, moulding figurative sculptures linked by a thread, Art Nouveau. His works make emotions visible by shaping and blending them in bronze. His works tell of the strength of women all over the world; six young women whose expressive faces represent six cultures and six different ways of conceiving relations between genders.
Today, more than ever, the revolutionary force of the feminine essence comes to the fore. The fairer sex, an expression of strength and resilience, imposes itself in the world of the Dutch artist as a force of United Cultures. Six women, six ethnicities, and six bronze sculptures representing six geographical and cultural areas of the globe tell us about the obstacles and daily humiliations endured by the strength of women’s inherent creative energy.
The ancient awe of the Great Mother or Mother Goddess revives and regenerates with the same essence in the world’s different cultures, in the full creed of multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity. Six different ethnicities but one soul.
The journey he began in 2010 culminated in the spring of 2015, ready to be displayed at the Expo in Milan. The works of the Dutch genius, at first little considered by critics, have ended up becoming an object of interest throughout Europe, conquering prestigious showcases such as The United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, or the well-known Keukenhof flower park in Holland.
Overseas, he landed in Miami in a digital exhibition set up as part of one of the most important international contemporary art fairs, then in New York, Tokyo and in all the cities where his sculptures meet the most diverse audiences: men and women differing in their traditions and struggles for emancipation. The artist encounters, absorbs, feeds on and questions his own and other cultures. He listens, learns and models himself and only gives shape to his works at the end of this path.
Art is a need, and Johannes Genemans’ need is to give his works the soul of emotional instinct in order to transmit it to the beholder.
Enjoy even more @ genemansscultore.it
Article edited by Prof. Luca Caricato
Luca Caricato – The World of Art
Leonardo Da Vinci Scholar
Art Historian – Art Expert