Nynke Koster works with rubber casting techniques to express her fascination with the existing would around us. In particular, she creates casts of existing architectural objects and fragments, capturing the ornament, detail and history of places.

One of the most striking examples of Koster’s work is her version of the Porta del Paradiso by Lorenzo Ghilberti (1378-1455). During the final years of her education at the Royal Academy for the arts in The Hague she became fascinated with this monumental entrance piece, of which the academy owns a reproduction. The original plaster cast was bought in 1921 by the former director of the academy, Mr. Scheurleer. Koster collaborated with the finest mouldmaker of the Netherlands, Oscar Paanen, to create a rubber cast of the inverted gates of paradise. To realise this challenging project they use a technique for rubber casting developped by Paanen himself. From this cast Koster created a stand-alone, horizontal and treadable reproduction. The result is a piece of ‘furniture,’ which serves as both a functional object and a  work of art.

Koster’s ambition is to use this rubber casting technique to rediscover and reinterpret architectural history around the world. Her  latest body of work, Elements in Time, is a continuation of these ideas. For it, she created playful rubber stools that take on the iconic shapes from the history of ornamentation. It becomes possible to sit on a Baroque ceiling, the corner of an Art Nouveau building or a Cassette from the Neoclassical era.

You can discover more about Nynke Koster and her inspiring works here.