This is the first European museum exhibition of Californian artist/skateboarder Ed Templeton (1972). Templeton lives and works in Huntington Beach, California.

Templeton has won worldwide renown primarily for his skills as a professional skateboarder, although is receiving growing acclaim as an artist. He recently broke onto the art scene by winning an important photography prize for his series Teenage Smokers. Templeton had his first solo Space 1026, Philadelphia, in November 1998.

Ed Templeton took up skateboarding at the age of thirteen, and by 1990 had made it his career. While still at school, he became fascinated by famous skateboarders like Niels Blender, Mark Gonzales and Chris Miller, who combined skateboarding with an artistic career. Templeton became intrigued by the artwork on the skateboards and the ‘grip tape art’ in skate magazines.

But it was a book on the work of Egon Schiele that ultimately inspired him to paint. In that same year, 1990, Templeton gave countless demonstrations and competed in skateboarding events, but spent all his free time in museums or behind the camera. With the skateboarding competitions behind him for that year, Templeton harnessed the inspiration to paint and became a proficient pupil in his high school art classes.

In 1993 he launched Toy machine bloodsucking skateboard company, and discovered graphic design. At around 1995 Templeton delved into photography more seriously and started documenting his own life and that of his friends and fellow skateboarders. Today, he is still a successful skateboarder and creative director of Toy machine. As a skateboarder he travels the world, capturing his vision of this world on canvas and on film.

In the exhibition Situation Comedy Templeton presents paintings, drawings and photos. The paintings are portraits of people he met on the street while skateboarding. He calls them sketchbook paintings because he constructs them sketchbook-style, bit by bit. The photos also show people and situations Templeton encounters in the skate world.

Like his good friend and artist Larry Clark he documents the wild life of ‘sex, drugs and skating', focusing on how people spend their time in between skateboarding, with overlaps to his own life. The exhibition walls are practically at bursting point, with around 200 photos, drawings and paintings. This is a deliberate choice Templeton’s part, and a way of overloading the viewer with impressions and images.

An artist book/exhibition (price 25 guilders) accompanies the exhibition. The exhibition is realized as part of a collaborative project between Het Domein, de Vleeshal in Middelburg and the MU Art Foundation in Eindhoven. Skateboarding culture is the joint project’s underlying theme. Het Domein drew attention to skateboarding in a previous exhibition, Weapons and Armor (April 2000) with the American skateboarder/artist Mark Gonzales.