From 30 August through 2 November, 2003, in De Hallen David Bade exhibited the installation Your Reference. This presentation consisted of an overwhelming number of drawings, paintings, assemblages and sculptures.

Your Reference flooded the visitor with visual information, stimuli and signals. The installation is a complex fabric of paintings and three-dimensional work. This visual bombardment startles, baffles, bewilders and entertains the visitor.

The work of David Bade (Willemstad, Curaçao, 1970) has the nature of a visual diary incorporating a multitude of anecdotes, commentaries, experiences and insights. Motifs surface in his sculptures and drawings that are derived from mass culture, the erotic, sports, art, religion, politics, everyday conversation and everything else that makes life worth living.

Bade’s drawings are sharp and conceived separately Often the artist supplements the drawings with critical texts. They are narrative scenes full of caricatural exaggerations. Bade’s three-dimensional work arises associatively. The sculptures take on an informal, sometimes even a somewhat playful character through his frequent use of all sorts of waste materials and common components such as polyurethane foam, clay, wood, cardboard, metal and plastic. For his installations David Bade brings together an overwhelming number of drawings and sculptures, as he did recently for the GEM at the Kunstrai. The artist was working on the objects and drawings in his installation until the very last moment. Parts of three-dimensional works are sometimes removed to be used separately, or the original work used without them. The artist continues to intervene, changing the works. They are never finished, but are in a temporary form for the installation. For Bade the multiplicity of objects in his installations is a metaphor for the complexity and plenitude of life itself.