They are fans of each other’s work. That in itself inspired a – perhaps unexpected – duo presentation with work by Paul Kooiker and Marenne Welten. Exciting and especially challenging is the game that both play with ‘falsifying’, distorting and simultaneously intensifying reality.
Marenne Welten is guided by memory. The flow of time and her personal reflections on it emerge from the material in her paintings. She searches the farthest corners of the kingdom of memory for the images that may lie within them. A mental image produces an idea for a work, and then that image is conjured up from the material – thick layers of oil paint – in an almost sculptural way. For Marenne Welten, time is not the constraining straitjacket of chronology. In her work she takes the viewer along to the places where the traces of personal themes lie. These themes take on a universal shape under her searching hand.
We showed Paul Kooiker’s images from his series of Fashion works in a solo during Paris Photo in November 2023. It turned out to be a striking presentation, which received enthusiastic response and, in combination with the newly published book Fashion, proved to be a highlight at the fair. “Fashion” is a concept that represents what is trending at the moment. Yet, Paul Kooiker’s work is characterized by a certain timelessness. The artist portrays the biggest fashion brands and the most famous faces of this moment, but translates them into a completely unique world, where his style strongly refers to the history of photography and art movements such as surrealism.
For both the work of Paul Kooiker and Marenne Welten, it is the imagination that pushes the boundaries of the medium in which they work.