Maarten Baas: Reconstructing Time – The Art of Timekeeping at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Ladbroke Hall
As one of London’s most dynamic destinations for collectable design and boundary-pushing creativity, Carpenters Workshop Gallery continues its mission to spotlight the world’s most innovative artists and designers. Nestled within the historic architecture of Ladbroke Hall, the gallery’s West London outpost has become a vital hub for contemporary craft, immersive exhibitions, and material exploration. This summer, it plays host to one of its most engaging and conceptual shows yet: Maarten Baas – Reconstructing Time, on view from 22 May to 30 August 2025.
This exhibition introduces three new additions to the Dutch designer’s celebrated Real Time series, continuing his unique interrogation of time through a mixture of video performance, design, and sculpture. Through wit, warmth, and existential insight, Baas transforms the simple act of clock-watching into an emotional and artistic experience—one that invites viewers to slow down, reflect, and reconstruct their relationship with time itself.
Maarten Baas: A Designer Who Defies Convention
Maarten Baas is one of the most influential figures in contemporary Dutch design, known for work that sits at the crossroads of performance art, design, philosophy, and play. Since gaining recognition for his 2002 project “Smoke,” where he transformed classic furniture pieces into new sculptural forms by charing them, Baas has continued to challenge the rules of aesthetics, production, and functionality.
His practice is infused with a childlike curiosity and conceptual rigour, often exploring themes of imperfection, ephemerality, and the human condition. Rather than seeking polished finality, Baas embraces the raw, the handmade, and the emotive. With Reconstructing Time, he brings these sensibilities to the realm of horology, reimagining the clock not as a static object but as a living performance.
Real Time: Time as Theatre
The exhibition’s central focus is Baas’s long-running and evolving Real Time series—a groundbreaking body of work where each timepiece houses a live or pre-recorded video performance that visually depicts the passage of time. These clocks don’t just tell time; they perform it.
Real Time is where theatre meets utility. The familiar mechanics of the clock are reframed through conceptual storytelling and performative gesture, offering a surreal, often humorous alternative to digital precision. In each work, time is drawn, swept, or constructed—slowly, deliberately—reminding viewers of its mutable, human quality.
Jan Jutte Clock: A Collaboration Through Generations
In the Jan Jutte Clock, Baas invites celebrated Dutch illustrator Jan Jutte—a former art teacher of Baas and an award-winning children’s book artist—to take centre stage. The piece captures Jutte sketching clock hands with charcoal in real time, each hour. As the minutes pass, he fills the surrounding space with vibrant illustrations that comment on the nature and movement of time.
The result is a constantly evolving artwork that expands visually with each passing moment, only to be erased and reimagined at the top of the next hour. Here, creativity becomes cyclical, echoing the rhythms of nature and memory. It is both a homage to the creative process and an invitation to experience the passage of time as a continuous act of reinvention.
The interplay between student and mentor, past and present, reinforces one of the exhibition’s core messages: time is a dialogue, not a fixed measurement. The clock becomes a canvas of evolving expression—a medium for storytelling, colour, and reflection.
Confetti Clock: Celebration, Chaos, and Control
With Confetti Clock, Baas introduces a wildly energetic and layered commentary on time, hedonism, and order. The filmed performance shows a space overwhelmed by celebratory chaos—confetti raining down in colourful flurries, symbols of joy and fleeting pleasure. Amid the excess stands a lone figure, methodically sweeping the confetti to clear and maintain visibility of the clock’s hands.
Each hour, precisely at 11 minutes past, a burst of new confetti falls—a playful reference to the number 11’s significance in European Carnival traditions, where festivities officially begin at the 11th minute of the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month. This cultural anchor adds a historical rhythm to the otherwise unrestrained exuberance.
Yet beneath the surface of this whimsical scene lies a meditation on responsibility and temporality. The figure’s endless cleaning becomes a metaphor for humanity’s attempt to impose structure on life’s unpredictable moments. It speaks to how we measure significance, maintain focus amid distraction, and create meaning from transient celebration.
Reconstruction Clock: Order from Chaos
The third major piece in the exhibition, Reconstruction Clock, is perhaps the most philosophical. Filmed continuously over 12 hours, the performance features human hands meticulously arranging scattered components—metal rods, gears, and discs—into the shape of a functioning clock face. Every minute, the performer shifts the parts to accurately indicate the time.
This act of building time becomes a slow, meditative ritual. It’s a poetic metaphor for the way we reconstruct our perception of time through lived experience. The clock, often seen as a rigid tool of measurement, becomes instead a fragile construction—one that must be continuously rebuilt, understood, and interpreted.
The work also encourages viewers to consider the often-invisible mechanisms behind the everyday. The exposed gears and hands, constantly adjusted and rebalanced, reflect the delicate choreography that underpins not just clocks, but life itself.
Reconstructing Time: A Celebration of the Ephemeral
What makes Maarten Baas’s Reconstructing Time at Carpenters Workshop Gallery so resonant is its fusion of intellectual depth and emotional accessibility. The works are complex, yet instantly captivating; layered with symbolism, yet filled with humour and warmth.
At a time when digital precision defines how we experience each second, Baas invites us to reconnect with the organic, human side of time. His clocks move slowly and imperfectly—not in spite of, but because of their design. Each second becomes a performance, each minute an artwork.
This exhibition doesn’t just challenge how we measure time. It reawakens the viewer to the beauty of the moment, the messiness of life, and the joy of being present.
Visit the Exhibition
Maarten Baas: Reconstructing Time
22 May – 30 August 2025
Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Ladbroke Hall
79 Barlby Road, London W10 6AZ
