70% – Titia Frieling en Gijs Frieling

The exhibition ‘70%’ features the work of Gijs Frieling (1966) and his mother Tita Frieling (1944).

Together they will turn No Limits! Art Castle into a life-sized dollhouse. The veneer on the walls, the ceiling lights, the carpets, windows and doors will be painted life-size with egg tempera. The house will then be decorated with the embroideries of Tita and her friends. 70% offers a roof to art that was hardly ever shown in the institutional art world, as it was created at the kitchen table in the evenings, in between work and household chores.

Titia van Osselen was born in Culemborg on October 9 in the hunger winter of 1944. At the age of five she made a crown out of paper, which she decorated with wood shavings. When she insisted to keep wearing the crown during her bike ride to school, her mother Nelke remarked: “but then everyone will look at you”. “That’s exactly what I want”, responded Titia. Later, she studies law in Leiden for three years and met Dirk Frieling. His jackets smelled like the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, and she fell in love with him. Shortly after they got married, Gijs was born in 1966. Later in life, after she had two more children, Titia attended evening classes at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam to study interior design. As her graduation project she devised and designed a new function for the Veem warehouse on the van Diemenstraat, which was scheduled to be demolished. For some time she designed kitchens and other funishings for acquaintances and others. She then became head of the organization of the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, where she organized, among other things, a large exhibition of Sunday painters, which was subsequently repeated annually for ten years.

Titia is a doer, according to her husband Dirk (1937-2011) she aims for 70% as a result for anything she does, and is therefore not afraid to start anything new at any moment. For years, she and a friend painted every Tuesday at their kitchen table. Later she started freehand embroidering, with paintings by Rousseau le Douanier and by her son Gijs serving as inspiration.

Gijs started at the Rietveld Academy in 1986 and graduated as a painter. He now exclusively makes murals, sometimes as small as a toilet wall, others the size of churches. Some of these are permanent, most are painted over in time. He is often assisted in this by his eldest son Daan Frieling.

70% celebrates the Sunday painter and the free stitch in three generations of Frieling.