Clever, playful, a bit cheeky, and often downright funny: Maarten Baas’s work puts smiles on faces. Take the series of clocks he’s built, which you’d swear contain a little man who’s crawled inside to wipe out the hands each minute and draw them back in, shifted a few centimetres – ad infinitum. He’s also built chairs that seem to have been made out of modelling clay by a child. A number of recent installations see him humorously criticising our often hotheaded way of exchanging opinions. His topics reveal a desire to work in a pure, direct fashion, but his work also touches on themes like imperfection, time and ephemerality.

Growing Goals (2021)
There’s nothing Maarten Baas likes more than a kickabout; as a child, he purposely refused to join a football club, as the competitive element would take the joy out of the game. A game of football requires a ball and not much else: throw a pair of coats on the ground and hey presto, there’s your goal. For everything else – a perfect pass, a brilliant goal, a roaring crowd – your imagination’s the limit. And from that imagination springs hope, Maarten Baas says: you imagine what isn’t there, but what might well be yet to come. He took the abandoned plot behind Sint Paulusabdij and replaced the crumbling wooden goalposts with young trees. And he painted crisp, straight lines all over the molehills and clumps of grass. Much like the goals that shape our lives, the trees will change with the seasons, growing stronger and taller as the years pass. They will live on after the biennial, happily growing and developing further. Who knows how high they’ll raise the bar?