About the artist
Hugo Vrijdag
Hugo vrijdag (1970) is the creator of the personal luminous dots that will be hanging behind thousands of windows during GLOW 2020. With these 20.000 self-made red dots, that everyone can provide with a personal message, Vrijdag explains the connection between young and old, artist and amateur, acquaintances and strangers. Vrijdag is co-founder of the science centra De Ontdekfabriek (Eindhoven), Het Ontdekstation (Tilburg) and De Uitvindfabriek (Breda).
Vrijdag studied at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. As a visual artist/designer he combines his fascination with technique and storytelling. Stories form the basis of his designs. They take shape in feature films and pieces of art in public space. Vrijdag has also made throughout the years a lot of light installations for GLOW in public spaces.
Previous work
In 2018, Vrijdag received a lot of praise for his light art project ‘Escape from the machine 3’, in which thin fiber-optic wires that lit up one after another suggested that a bird was flying between the buildings.
During the same edition, he created his first collaborative work ‘Bixie’ with the Chinese artist Gu Yeliang. A dragon lion, the Chinese City’s symbol of Nanjing, Eindhoven’s sister city. Under the supervision of Gu Yeliang, Bixie was built especially by local craftsmen in Nanjing for this edition of GLOW. Hugo Vrijdag designed the image to depict the cooperation between the cities of Eindhoven and Nanjing.
During the 2019 edition, Vrijdag was the designer of a sea of Sunflowers, which transformed the Lichtplein in Eindhoven into a true Van Gogh painting. This light artwork is a homage to Vincent van Gogh, who painted 69 sunflowers during his time in Arles France. Van Gogh saw his sunflowers as lanterns. With this literal interpretation as a source of inspiration, the Eindhoven-based light artist Hugo Vrijdag and the light festival Nanjing under the auspices of Gu Yeliang have entered a collaboration for the second time.
