19 december 2024, Yves Joris
Red as a connector: Lotte Wieringa’s dance of colours
On entering the Helen Frankenthaler Room at NQ Gallery, visitors are enveloped by a glow of colours that is as powerful as it is subtle. Red dominates, but not one-dimensionally. In Lotte Wieringa's exhibition Falling into You, the colour unfolds in various forms and emotions. It is an invitation to delve deeper into what colour can mean—as a symbol, as an emotion, as a life force. Her work is a dynamic interplay of paint in which the personal and the universal are in continuous dialogue.
The versatility of red
“I’ve worked a lot with red over the past year,” says Lotte Wieringa. “Red can express both warmth and comfort, a safe embrace in a mother’s arms. Yet it also represents anger, violence and blood. It carries a tension within itself that reflects the world.” This tension is palpable in her paintings, in which red continually interacts with other colours. Red mixed with magenta evokes a warm, glowing feeling, while deep purple hardens the red. “And combined with mint green, it bursts with life.” In the exhibition Falling into You, Wieringa explores the red that lets go—like leaves turning red on trees, falling and eventually returning to the earth as humus. “It’s never just about red alone,” she says. “It’s about red in relation to other colours, to the seasons, to life itself.”
Lotte Wieringa, Blue, 2024, NQ Gallery
Her paintings breathe movement. “If you zoom in closely on life,” she explains, “everything falls apart into vibrating particles: atoms and energy, with empty spaces in between. This awareness of everything being interconnected forms the core of my work.” The paint on her canvases seems to dance—layered and rhythmic, almost poetic in nature. “Poetry plays a significant role in my work,” she says. “Not in the sense that it directly influences my paintings, but the rhythms and layers characteristic of poetry are mirrored in the way I paint.”
The lines and scratches that define her work sometimes resemble writing. To Wieringa, language is nothing more than a concept, a form—her paintings go beyond concepts and seek the essence of life.
Lotte Wieringa, Fall Falling, 2024, NQ Gallery
Ephemerality and rebirth: the rhythm of nature
Autumn is not only visually present in the exhibition, but also thematically. The leaves turning red and ultimately falling symbolise the transience of life. This theme is a constant in her work. “The images were created with autumn in mind,” she says. “My work is about growing, blooming and letting go. Everything is part of a greater whole.” To the artist, the cycle of life and death is not a tragedy, but a natural evolution. “All the things outside can reach me, move through me, but I know they do not belong to me,” she writes in the poem accompanying her exhibition.
Nature as a metaphor recurs repeatedly in her work. “In addition to painting, I would also like to eventually manage a piece of land where everything can grow, bloom and buzz,” she says. “Perhaps I’d build a special little structure with some paintings inside to show how closely life and something like painting can be intertwined. How beautiful it is and how much love it contains.”
Lotte Wieringa, Poppy, 2024, NQ Gallery
Berlin and the power of simplicity
The artist has lived and worked in Berlin for a year now. “The place where I work always influences what I create,” she says. “The energy of the city, the people, the history, the trees—everything matters.” In Berlin, her work has become rawer, with bold colours and expressive movements. “The caution is gone,” she says. “I’m getting closer and closer to the canvas; painting can be so exciting.”
Although her work is conceptual and profound, Lotte remains true to the craft of painting. “My practice revolves around craftsmanship,” she says. “That’s where my strength comes from—from my hands and my own energy.” To her, this direct, physical connection between artist, material and moment determines the pure artistic result.
Lotte Wieringa, Skin to skin, 2024, NQ Gallery
An invitation to connect
With Falling into You, she invites the viewer to embrace the cycle of life and feel the interconnectedness between themselves and the world. Her paintings are not merely images on canvas, but encounters with colour, with emotion, with nature—and ultimately with ourselves. On leaving the room, the glow of red lingers, a reminder of the interconnectedness of everything. Red speaks of warmth, danger, love and loss, life and death. In Lotte Wieringa’s hands, it touches the essence of what it means to be human.
Lotte Wieringa, Falling into you, NQ Gallery. Foto door Kimberley Dhollander
