newsitems
Piet van Rens portrayed in clay
2023-11-15
In honor of Piet van Rens' retirement, we asked artist Mooniq Priem to create a unique clay sculpture of Van Rens. The portrait can now be admired at TAQ.
For many years, Piet van Rens has been an inspiration for our engineers to design principally right according to the construction principles as defined by Wim van der Hoek. Last year, he even won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society for Precision Engineering. With this sculpture, our team and the new generations to come will always be reminded of his presence and his work.
In order to properly sculpt every detail of Van Rens' face, Mooniq Priem located him on a platform which slightly rotated every few minutes. After the claying process was finished, which took three half days, a mold was drawn from the original and filled with marble resin. As a result, two sculptures were created: one for Settels Savenije and one for the Van Rens family. The work of Priem is characterized by a precise and free modeling touch. As she says herself (mooniqpriem.com): “I love the coarse, free, painterly touches of clay that touch the essence of the character with a degree of abstraction.”