Bas Jan Ader

Bas Jan Ader’s small but concentrated body of work, which included photographs, slide and video installations, films and drawings, gave way to the atmosphere of the late 1960’s. Unlike most artists of the time, Ader pushed his art to a quiet extreme as he consistently staged a tension between the body, human consciousness and natural forces.  In his final gesture toward exhausting the subject of his work by saying everything there was to say on the matter with as few words as possible, Ader set sail in 1975 from Cape Cod across the Atlantic from which he never returned. The feat was to be documented and presented in an exhibition in Amsterdam later that year.