Pim Blokker approaches the canvas as a game board. In his work the perspective continuously shifts or stretches out, and formal qualities and the physical act of painting both collide and merge. Blokker is not interested in illusion making but in linking personal associations to new depictions of reality. He sees the collective consciousness as something without a structure, end, or beginning, and plays with our fixed connotations and expectations of reality. This he does through juxtaposition, a confrontational use of logic and a slapstick kind of humor.
The lightness of a joke sets off the gravity of tragedy and visa versa. Juxtaposing hilarity and horror, two emotional extremes, allows him to examine somber issues in a playful way, to pass off absurdities as logical and to undermine seemingly established facts.
His work shows a certain lightness and openness what is particularly evident in the wall paintings he created especially for the gallery. The brushstrokes have a leisure like quality and remind of the optimism of some 1950’s paintings. Blokker knows his classics and can borrow iconography from the 80’s to give his own interpretation of all he likes to use.
Elspeth Diederix completed her studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 1995 (specializing in Free Work) and from 1998 to 2000 she was a resident artist at Amsterdam’s Academy for the Visual Arts. Before she started photographing she made sculptures and paintings, and both influences can still be traced in her photographic work. In 2002 Diederix won the Prix de Rome for Photography, and since then she has enjoyed international renown as a photographic artist. Huis Marseille has shown her work before, in the group exhibitions Supernatural(2004) and The Rediscovery of the World (2013). In 2009 Diederix started a blog, The Studio Garden, and since 2018 she has maintained a large public flower garden in Amsterdam’s Erasmus Park under the name The Miracle Garden – a garden which also serves as her atelier.
Daniel van Straalen starts a game with the mind of the viewer. By using images that are immediately recognizable, he offers an opportunity to interpret his work. At the same time, this possibility is also a deception: what is immediately recognized offers no more room for other associations. This also raises questions about authenticity, one of the key elements in Van Straalen's work. He investigates what authenticity still entails in a world dominated by the internet. Does it even matter what 'real' is and what 'fake' is, or who was the 'first' who came up with a certain idea?
Helen Verhoeven is a painter and sculptor. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute, New York Academy of Art, and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. In 2008 she won the Dutch Royal Award for Modern Painting and in 2010 she was the winner of the Wolvecamp Award. She was commissioned to make a painting for the new courthouse of Dutch Supreme Court in The Hague that opened in 2015. Verhoeven's works seem to explore the theme of ceremonial gatherings. She makes monumental-sized paintings that are populated with contorted figures in various states of rapture, despair, lust and estrangement.
Dina Danish's work combines conceptual art's preoccupation with language and structure with an emphasize on humor, misunderstanding, mistranslation, and supersition. Most of her works are based on substantial research into her subjects (be it chewing gum, a tongue twister or crowds at an aquarium), combined with her own variations on the truth. Sometimes it stays unclear what is made up by Danish or what is actually true. Her approach leads to multi-layered works in a variety of media. Be it a performance, a video, or an entire installation. For sure all of her works get the absurdistic out of the ordinary.