Slewe Gallery is pleased to announce Steven Aalders' new solo exhibition Passage, which will open on Saturday May 23. The exhibition shows two new series of paintings that were created the last two years. One series is titled Passage and the other Bridge. Both series share the same spatial divisions. However, in the Bridge series, this spatial division is doubled, and six colors are used in each painting, connected to one another in various ways. In Passage, three colors are used in each painting that differ more tonally, in light and dark.
Steven Aalders is known for his carefully crafted, minimal geometric oil paintings. His work is about proportion and colour. Modernist serial principles, such as repetition and uniformity, are linked to age-old concepts of imagining time and place. It is an attempt to create light and space through paint. In his paintings he expresses the rhythm of life. The multi-layered oil paintings demand a concentrated eye from the beholder. Aalders' colour palette has become more saturated in recent years and generally shows more dark tones. The choice of colour arises from impressions gained from nature or from studying colour theories. In addition, some series are inspired by the palette of old masters, such as that of the Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Nicolas Poussin and Paul Cézanne.
Steven Aalders, born in 1959 in Middelburg (NL), lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied in London at Croydon College of Art and at Ateliers 63 in Haarlem. In 2002 he had his first museum solo exhibition, entitled Vertical Thoughts at the S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium and in 2010 followed by Cardinal Points at the Kunstmuseum The Hague, on which occasion a catalogue was published with an overview of fifteen years work. In 2017 the book The Fifth Line. Thoughts of a Painter was published by Koenig Books, in which Aalders’ thoughts on art and particularly abstract art and its relation to the world are discussed in a series of interviews conducted by Robert van Altena. In 2020 he made an installation at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. In 2022 his exhibition Seasons in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo was on view, on which occasion an extensive catalogue was published by the museum in collaboration with Hatje Cantz, Berlin. Aalders’ work is internationally collected by both private and public collections, such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kröller-Müller Museum, Museum Voorlinden, AkzoNobel Art Foundation, ABNAMRO Art Collection, BPD Art Collection, Thoma Art Collection, Museum Over Holland and Museum Kurhaus Kleve.