
DIPTYCH_240314 (2024)
Part of the Blok mural series
Acrylic on wall, 100x500cm + 100x300cm. Realized on 3rd floor stairwell of Master Institute of Visual Cultures in Den Bosch.
Part of the Blok mural series
Acrylic on wall, 100x500cm + 100x300cm. Realized on 3rd floor stairwell of Master Institute of Visual Cultures in Den Bosch.
Part of the Blok series (Nigredo phase)
Emerging from the alchemical Nigredo phase, the Kompresor series investigates digital compression and psychological transformation through airbrush portraits. These works depict faces dissolving into pixelated abstractions, where facial features emerge from and disappear into the gridded structures characteristic of the broader Blok series.
Executed with meticulous airbrush technique, the portraits embody a paradox of control – the medium allows for hyper-precise gradations that nevertheless depict profound loss of detail. Each work begins with a high-resolution source image that undergoes systematic degradation, mirroring the destructive yet transformative nature of the Nigredo process. The resulting images hover between representation and abstraction, their compressed forms speaking to both digital mediation and psychological reduction.
As part of the Blok series’ exploration of rigid systems, Kompresor documents this initial phase of breaking down – where human identity confronts the relentless geometry of compression algorithms. The faces become landscapes of data loss, their fading particulars giving way to the emergent patterns of the underlying grid. This systematic undoing serves as necessary precursor to the subsequent alchemical stages of the work.
EXHIBITION HISTORY
The Way the Wind Blows / Stormslag (2025)
Curation: Storm Wilschut
Kabul à GoGo, Utrecht
Forever Young (2024)
Curation: Beroeps Organisatie Kunstenaars
Boterhal, Hoorn
INCUBATOR (2024)
Curation: Boris Gunst, Feodora Ratsiborinskaya
Documentation: Sil Munik
Kunstkerk, Dordtrecht
DUNGEON – Solo Exhibition (2024)
Curation: Bram Engelaar, Niek van der Veer
De Nijverheid, Utrecht
Part of the Blok series
Acrylic on paper, 21×29.7cm, engraved slate, 35x50cm
The “We Are Data” series represents an early, radical phase of the Blok investigations, predating and informing the later Kompresor works. These stark black-and-white paintings push digital compression to its absolute limits, reducing social media portraits to their barest binary essence.
Executed in acrylic on A4 paper, the forty works in this series systematically degrade digital source material to confront the paradox of identity in the age of algorithmic representation. Where Kompresor would later explore the gradations of loss, these works document the final threshold of recognition – the moment when faces cease being faces and become pure data structures.
This deliberate reduction served as both technical and psychological exercise, breaking down my own perfectionist tendencies through the ruthless simplification of form. The rigid pixel grids mirror the series’ conceptual framework: a self-imposed system designed to undermine control, where even the “failures” of misaligned blocks become necessary imperfections in the work’s digital/material hybridity.
As the foundational Nigredo manifestation within Blok, We Are Data established the alchemical approach that would later evolve through Kompresor and beyond – the methodical deconstruction of imagery as path to artistic and personal transformation. The series remains a crucial artifact of this destructive/creative threshold, where portraits stop representing people and start revealing the architectures of perception itself.
A selection of the portraits has been engraved on a slate tablet and buried in an undisclosed location as a part of Trash in the Yard exhibition.
EXHIBITION HISTORY
DUNGEON – Solo Exhibition (2024)
Curation: Bram Engelaar, Niek van der Veer
De Nijverheid, Utrecht
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
acrylic on wall
acrylic and ceramic stucco on wood, 90x130cm
In March 2023, eight young adults dubbed as the “Nestbouwers” joined the team at The Natural History Museum. They were a vibrant addition to the regular staff, always ready to voice their ideas and continually surprising the museum-goers. Their debut exhibition, ‘Fungi in the Spotlight’, served as an introduction to their unique group and their fascination with the under-appreciated group of organisms – fungi.
The Nestbouwers transformed the museum’s Haverhorst Vestibule into a new exhibition space called “The Broedplaats”. In this revamped space, they aimed to bridge the gap between humans and nature, bringing their innovative ideas to fruition. ‘Fungi in the Spotlight’, the first exhibition by The Nestbouwers, debuted on July 8, 2023.
During a guided tour through The Natural History Museum’s storage rooms, the Nestbouwers were captivated by the small yet exquisite fungi collection, predominantly encompassing mushrooms. Their curiosity led them to delve into how these organisms resonate with human life. ‘Fungi in the Spotlight’ allows visitors to learn more about the eight Nest Builders while simultaneously exploring the diversity, aesthetics, and functionality of fungi.
Part of this exhibition involved creating a prominent painting that directly interacted with a striking mural in the center of the space. This functioned as a visual representation, accentuating the symbiotic relationship between the fungi and the environment
Painting series
Acrylic on canvas, wood of variable sizes.
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.
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