Maarten Baas Play Time celebrates childish pleasures

Hand drawing clock hands, in orange and purple clocks, Maarten Baas Play Time exhibition

Maarten Baas’ ‘Children’s Clocks’ show the time thanks to 720 children’s drawings of time across 720 minutes

(Image credit: Carpenters Workshop Gallery)

Child’s play is considered through an artist’s lens by Maarten Baas, who has opened his first solo exhibition on America’s West Coast. Taking place at Carpenters Workshop Gallery on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles (until 26 May 2023), ‘Play Time’ unites works from across Baas’ collections.

Maarten Baas’ Play Time: celebrating the joy of childhood

childlike cabinet and light from Maarten Baas Play Time exhibition — ‘Close Parity Cabinet with Light’

The joy of childhood is considered in work from the collections ‘Real Time’, ‘Clay’ and ‘Close Parity’, with items interpreted as if through the eyes of a child, roughly sketched lines and offbeat shapes nodding to Baas’ signature playfulness.

His style, encompassing a bright rainbow of colours and offbeat geometrical outlines, is here expressed in a series of works that question the dual human desires to grow older and remain innocent.

Clocks with figure of person inside, from Maarten Baas Play Time exhibition — ‘Real Time XL The Artist’

Functionality is imbued with innocence, taking shape in quotidian items such as a grandfather clock created from chaotically placed planks of wood, as if from a child’s den.

Clocks continue to fascinate the designer in ‘720 Minutes Clocks’, a project Baas worked on with 720 children, each of whom created a drawing to show the time across 720 minutes, or 12 hours. Limited-edition pieces by Baas house these drawings to mark the time minute by minute, the aesthetic regressing to a state of childlike design. In ‘The Artist’, meanwhile, Baas is once again an adult, creating his art in a parody of control.

Haphazard grandfather clock from Maarten Baas Play Time exhibition — ‘Grandfather Clock The Son’

Elsewhere, Baas experiments with bronze, casting vast cabinets in pieces from the ‘Close Parity’ collection. Cutting surrealist silhouettes, the works appear to be almost toppling over in their top-heavy proportions, making a cartoonish play on a child’s perception.

'Play Time' is on view until 26 May 2023

Carpenters Workshop Gallery
7070 Santa Monica Blvd
West Hollywood,
CA 90038

carpentersworkshopgallery.com
maartenbaas.com

top-heavy asymmetric cabinet from Maarten Baas Play Time exhibition — ‘Close Parity Asymmetric Cabinet’

Hannah Silver is a writer and editor with over 20 years of experience in journalism, spanning national newspapers and independent magazines. Currently Art, Culture, Watches & Jewellery Editor of Wallpaper*, she has overseen offbeat art trends and conducted in-depth profiles for print and digital, as well as writing and commissioning extensively across the worlds of culture and luxury since joining in 2019.