BLOK

The Blok series emerged during global quarantine as a meditation on constrained spaces – both architectural and psychological. These pixelated black-and-white paintings translate the experience of lockdown into visual form, where dream fragments and wandering thoughts crystallize into the rigid geometry of Soviet-era apartment blocks. Working within self-imposed limitations of palette and form, the paintings visualize memory’s inherent compression, how lived experience becomes reduced to low-resolution impressions. The recurring concrete grid motif operates simultaneously as physical structure and mental architecture, a place people inhabit that equally inhabits them. This duality reflects the series’ core tension between external confinement and internal expansiveness. As the foundational works in my alchemical practice, the early Blok paintings established key concerns that would later evolve through We Are Data and Kompresor: the embrace of technical constraints as antidote to perfectionism, the transformation of digital artifacts into material form, and the use of systematic reduction to access deeper psychological truths. The series continues to document this negotiation between control and surrender, where even within the strictest formal boundaries – the pixel grid’s unyielding geometry – unexpected moments of organic irregularity emerge. These “flaws” become the work’s most human elements, artifacts of a hand wrestling with digital logic.

  • DIPTYCH_240314 (2024)

    Acrylic on wall, 100x500cm + 100x300cm. Realized on 3rd floor stairwell of Master Institute of Visual Cultures in Den Bosch. Part of Blok series.

  • ARCHIVIST_1.2 & NNCO (2024)

    Assemblage, filing cabinet, computer, software, plastic, servo motors, CRT monitor (4:3), dot-matrix printer, 1000 pages continuous 90 grs paper, 135x45x125cm.

    Diptych, acrylic, ceramic stucco, canvas, 75x150cm x 2

    WE_ARE_DATA (2021-2024)

    Acrylic on paper, 21×29.7cm. Part of Blok series.

    A selection of the portraits has been engraved on a 35x50cm slate tablet and buried in an undisclosed location as a part of Trash in the Yard exhibition.

    EXHIBITION HISTORY

    The Way the Wind Blows / Stormslag (2025)
    Curation: Storm Wilschut
    Kabul à GoGo, Utrecht

    DUNGEON – Solo Exhibition (2024)
    Curation: Bram Engelaar, Niek van der Veer
    De Nijverheid, Utrecht

    INCUBATOR (2024)
    Curation: Boris Gunst, Feodora Ratsiborinskaya
    Documentation: Sil Munik
    Kunstkerk, Dordtrecht

    Forever Young (2024)
    Curation: Beroeps Organisatie Kunstenaars
    Boterhal, Hoorn

    Trash in the Yard (2022)
    Curation: Martina Raponi, Belle Phromchanya, Eden Mitsenmacher
    Arboretum Trompenburg, Rotterdam

    Fundacja Ocalenie – Fundraiser Exhibition (2022)
    MONO, Rotterdam

    Place to Be (2022)
    Curation: Ine van der Horn
    Galerie Pouloeuff, Naarden

  • BLOK (2021-2023)

    Acrylic on canvas, wood of variable sizes.

    EXHIBITION HISTORY

    DUNGEON – Solo Exhibition (2024)
    Curation: Bram Engelaar, Niek van der Veer
    De Nijverheid, Utrecht

    Crisiskunst (2022)
    Curation: Zoë Cochia, Float
    Galerie Niffo, Rotterdam

    Kunstprijs Charlois (2022)
    Curation: Karin Trenkel
    Karel De Stouteplein, Rotterdam

    Place to Be (2022)
    Curation: Ine van der Horn
    Galerie Pouloeuff, Naarden-Vesting

    Eigen Domein (2022)
    Curation: Maria Makridis
    LOU Oudenoord, Utrecht

    House Peace (2021)
    Hotel Mokum, Amsterdam

    Dit is Culture (2021)
    Red Floor Gallery, Alexandrium Shopping Centre, Rotterdam

  • MARK_IT_DOWN (2021)

    Acrylic paint on wall, 1200m2 surface at Rhôneweg in Amsterdam

    Curation: Elias Rammelt, Babeth Rammelt
    Documentation: Artur Gierwatowski
    With works by: Dominique Latoul, Rowan van der Sterren, Candela Nadin, Dorien Spangenburg, Clotilde JNT, Titia Thomann, Luna Haverkorn, Silvana Araoz-Fraser, Christina Mastori, Dido Kok
    Rhôneweg, Amsterdam

    Art should be accessible to everyone, and this goal can be achieved by bringing creators and viewers together in a visual-spatial interaction. The “Mark It Down” mural initiative, realized on a 1,200m2 surface at Rhôneweg in Amsterdam, was made possible through a collaborative effort between Sikkens, the MAKERSTOREN, and a collective of international artists.