Tonni van Sommeren

Showroom Dummies

Tonni van Sommeren names his latest series after the Kraftwerk song.
We are showroom dummies, we are standing here exposing ourselves, we 're being watched.

Almost every day he visits thrift stores, looking for wooden figurines within a radius of 30 km. Decorative, touristic, religious, ordinary, exotic and/or clichéd. It is the mixture of art, home industry and folklore, the combination of the banal and the sublime that attracts him.

He collects and cherishes these images, but also attacks them harshly. He halves and saws, exchanges legs, arms or heads. By putting different parts together differently, he creates hybrid figures. Van Sommeren also surprises himself: new characters emerge that transcend the typical thrift store image. They seem to have been brought back from very strange journeys, rooted in undiscovered cultures or long-forgotten rituals. This summer he has them pose publicly for the first time in MVAT's quirky showroom.

Anyone who passes by may hear them singing;
We are showroom dummies, we start to move, we break the glass.

June 8 - August 17, 2019