09 april 2026, Flor Linckens
Driessens & van den Baar: what becomes visible through light
Until 26 April, Gallery Untitled in Rotterdam presents the exhibition 'Verzwinden' by Driessens & van den Baar. The Rotterdam-based artist duo, consisting of Nicole Driessens and Ivo van den Baar, have collaborated since 1999 on a practice in which material research and social questions are closely intertwined. Through skilled craftsmanship and vibrant colours, they seek to draw the viewer in, before introducing a pressing contemporary issue and raising the question of what our own role might be in that.
On their website, the artists state: “Our lives are in total connection with each other, with our work, with the city of Rotterdam and with developments in the world. Art is the profession in which we investigate and propagate this. Since 2009, migration, the movement of people around the world in search of a place to build their livelihood, has been the recurring theme in our work. As visual artists, we develop images with a vision of current events, as they can be felt in our immediate environment. Our mission is to seduce with the beauty of the images, then to reveal a deeper message that provokes doubt and prompts reconsideration.”
In the work of Driessens & van den Baar, materials and their technical possibilities play a central role. The duo frequently works with wool felt, a choice that is far from neutral. This soft and tactile material, often rendered in bright, almost sugary colours, traditionally signifies protection from the elements, in sharp contrast with the fragile natural landscapes it depicts.
For 'Verzwinden', the artists developed a new series of works as part of a long-term research project, supported by the Amarte Fund, the Mondriaan Fund and the Cultuurfonds. The works are created by exposing wool felt to UV light, with the sun as the source. Using contact negatives, images are slowly fixed into the material, a process that takes weeks. Wool felt has the appealing quality of rendering colour in a rich and vivid way. Epoxy resin also regularly appears in their practice. In this way, the artists position themselves at the intersection of art and design, somewhere between two and three dimensions.
The city of Rotterdam, their immediate environment, often serves as a point of departure. Earlier works explored migration and belonging, symbolically expressed through houseplants that signal the intention to stay, or through abandoned household items and bulky waste that bear witness to people leaving, willingly or otherwise, in search of a better life. In 2022, they presented their installation "No One is Illegal" at S.M.A.K. in Ghent. A year later, they showed a series of works at Gallery Untitled that resulted from a year-long investigation into the protective, threatening and threatened aspects of nature, ranging from violent seas, forest fires and relentless deserts to fragile coral rapidly being destroyed as a result of human action.
Several works in the current exhibition in Gallery Untitled refer to a well-known work from art history: the iconic raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault, held in the Louvre. Only nine of the 149 passengers survived this infamous shipwreck of 1816. In "night flight II", for example, the composition echoes this scene in dialogue with a coral formation, while in "Verzwinden II", it reappears in relation to what seems to be a scorched landscape.
Nicole Driessens obtained her degree at (what is now) the Fontys University of the Arts and Ivo van den Baar studied at (what is now) St. Joost School of Art & Design in Den Bosch. Their work has previously been shown at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, De Kunsthal, the Natural History Museum Rotterdam and the Centraal Museum. Their work is held in the collections of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Vitra Design Museum, Missoni, Rabobank, Triodos Bank and the Centraal Museum Utrecht. Their clients include KLM, Nationale Nederlanden, Max Mara and the District Court of Rotterdam.
