23 september 2025, Wouter van den Eijkel
Colour field painting revisited
Galerie Roger Katwijk is opening the season with a parade of artists working in the tradition of colour field painting. Anyone who thought Rothko, Noland and Newman had exhausted all the possibilities of the monochromatic colour plane is mistaken. We spoke with Roger Katwijk about the composition of the show and his new gallery space since last April.
Colour Field Explorations, featuring work by Erna Anema, Gijs van Lith, John O'Carroll, Gerard Prent, Alexandra Roozen, and Dirk Salz, can be seen at Roger Katwijk in Amsterdam until October 11.
New space, same block
For years, Galerie Roger Katwijk was located in a large space just a few doors down the street, but last spring, Katwijk had to vacate that space. After some searching, he found a smaller location on the same block on Prinsengracht, so he moved from number 737 to 799, close to the corner of Nieuwe Spiegelstraat. The new space is more exposed to foot traffic, bringing more casual visitors. At the current location, Dirk Salz’s blue wall sculpture in particular catches the attention of passersby. “People want to know how it’s made,” Katwijk explains. Understandably so, as Salz’s work is hard to miss.
Dirk Salz, Galerie Roger Katwijk
Endless polishing
Among the six participating artists, Salz’s wall sculptures visually resemble Mark Rothko’s colour field paintings the most—Rothko being almost synonymous with the genre. But Salz takes a different approach. Like Rothko, Dirk Salz (Germany, 1962) constructs his work from countless layers that suggest depth, but instead of paint, uses epoxy and pigment. He applies a layer of pigment and epoxy, lets it cure and then polishes it. This painstaking process is repeated around 30 thirty times. The result is a smooth, mirror-like surface that appears a lighter blue along the edges than at the centre. “If you stand in front of it long enough, you no longer see your own reflection, but the depth of the blue. The work has a calming effect,” says the gallerist.
Alexandra Roozen, Galerie Roger Katwijk
Another moment of stillness in the exhibition is provided by the wall of works on paper by Alexandra Roozen (Netherlands, 1971). Roozen explores such themes as silence, slowness and infinity using nothing more than black pencil on paper. Her work is characterised by minimal visual elements—dots and lines. The viewer cannot help but marvel at the meticulousness: one wrong move, one smudge of graphite and she would have to start all over again. The density of the lines is astonishing. Viewed from the side, the graphite rises physically from the paper. The black is so intensely dark that the untouched areas appear to emit light.
John O’Carroll, Galerie Roger Katwijk
Katwijk’s collaboration with British artist John O’Carroll also goes back many years. Like Salz, O’Carroll has earned an international reputation. O’Carroll (UK, 1985) lives and works in Cornwall, the peninsula at the far southwest of England. The southern coast is almost subtropical, while on the north coast, where O’Carroll lives, the Atlantic Ocean pounds against the cliffs. This environment plays a major role in his work. In the three pieces currently on display at Roger Katwijk, we see a white, wave-like surface set against a background of oxidised gold leaf and copper. The pigments for the blue and white in his work come from Egypt, where he has long been involved as a draftsman in several projects around the Dakhla Oases.
Erna Anema, Galerie Roger Katwijk
Nature is also the starting point of Erna Anema’s canvases. Anema (Netherlands, 1954) is an avid hiker with a special love for mountains and glaciers, particularly the gaps in terminal moraines (accumulations of debris and rock left behind by melting glaciers) formed by climate change. A graduate of both the Rietveld Academy and Rijksakademie, Anema does not paint the landscape itself, but rather its impact on her. The moraines serve as a subject suited to the painterly questions posed. Her breathing is literally reflected in her brushstrokes, just as when she is high on a moraine or glacier in the thin air: ‘breathe in and breathe out’. With this approach, she explores the dynamics of the moraine—the breaking and colliding of ice masses.
Gijs van Lith, Galerie Roger Katwijk
A promising name
At the front of the gallery is work by Gijs van Lith. Though Van Lith is already 41, he is still considered an up-and-coming artist, partly because he is better known in the south of the Netherlands. Katwijk hopes to change that by including him in this group show.
Like Salz, Van Lith composes his work in layers, though using a different approach. “Gijs works in the painterly tradition of looking at the canvas for a long time, removing elements and then adding new ones. So, in the end, his paintings are deeply layered.” The work on display at Roger Katwijk is more expressive than his earlier work, with a more exuberant use of colour.
Colour Field Explorations, with work by Erna Anema (NL), Gijs van Lith (NL), John O'Carroll (UK), Gerard Prent (NL), Alexandra Roozen (NL) and Dirk Salz (DE), can be seen at Roger Katwijk in Amsterdam through 11 October.
