A Fug and his Daughter: Tuli Kupferberg & Samara Kupferberg

Hok Gallery Den Haag, April 21st – May 21st, 2023

REVIEW

By Malcolm Paul

THE HOK Gallery Den Haag is small but intimate, tucked away off the city centre of the political capital of the Netherlands – ironically a joint’s throw away from the Freak Brothers Coffee Shop – and owned by the Van der Helm family. Alfred/Angie and daughter Lula have a reputation for running the home of ‘contemporary underground art’ providing an ‘independent art space’. If you are prepared to make the journey, you won’t be disappointed. I certainly wasn’t…

Combining a family visit to the Netherlands (my two sons are half-Dutch and live there) I found my visit fortuitously coinciding with an exhibition of the drawings and art works of the family Kupferberg: father and daughter Tuli and Samara.

 

Pictured above: Exhibition poster

Sadly, Tuli left us in 2010 and the artist’s baton has been passed to his very talented daughter Samara who, though she exhibits a very different style – more abstract than the figurative freeform cartoon sketches of her father – both share the same wall space and harmonise perfectly. How?

Well, it has a lot to do with the environment and the way the exhibition has been hung, by whom and, dare I say, how that the karma/Stimmung has been created. In this case, it is Samara who has made the whole room feel homely, uncluttered and therefore a place of love and togetherness.

You certainly feel it: that affectionate closeness between father and daughter flows down from the walls, laps over the viewer. Something special is happening – you are embraced by all around you. It reminded me of my home when the children were young and they turned every room in the house into a gallery. My partner was an artist and I did graphics, so we all jostled riotously for wall space but we never clashed. I feel that here in the Hok.

So who was Tuli? Tuli Kupferberg was a Fug, co-founder of the Fugs (the other being Ed Sanders) a countercultural, multi-talented guerrilla art army at war with the ultra conservative forces in the United States: 1964 post-Kennedy, the war in Vietnam getting into its stride, the social/ culture and political worldwide upheaval was coming to the boil and the Fugs were there to lead the charge. Tuli was one of the active organisers and a vocal spokesman: a true legend.

 

Pictured above: Images by the two Kupferbergs mingle on the walls

What surprised me at the exhibition was to find out that Tuli’s artwork predated the Fugs and was more the offspring of the Beats and their brand of anti-establishment art and individual searching.

So we have Tuli Kupferberg with the Beats! That explains the books on the gallery coffee table: Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, the first album of the Fugs. So, we’ve got the Beats in the room, Tuli older but still able to trapeze across the eras and join the rebels of the Sixties counterculture and lead the very same.

We have the posters on the wall – the distinct Sixties graphics, the swirling lettering like escapees from an acid trip – hung alongside the the freeform, visual scat/satirical drawings that Tuli created prolifically, beautiful in their simplicity and playfulness yet still capable of carrying a message. They reminded me of the John Lennon drawings of the Sixties though of course Lennon was the heir not the originator. The same dance of line and shape filling the paper with joyous abandon.

While Tuli jives, Samara reflects in her abstract drawings, which I believe were done during lockdown. I look at them I think, were you trying to imagine yourself somewhere in space, ‘all across the universe’, away from the pain of being forced to isolate as the nightmare of Covid raged outside your door. I wonder because that fear made us all want to escape (I was working the ‘frontline’) to another place: a solar system away from the horror outside…