Paul Beumer’s painterly practice oscillates freely between figuration and abstraction, but in the past few years gained a specific focus on the relationship and dichotomies between Western and Asian approaches to landscape painting and nature. Steering away from the conventions of the brush and canvas his works are made on a variation of loose cloths. He engages ink or chlorine and manual resist-dyeing techniques to produce abstract patterns that feel like faint memories of Western High Modernism in that they allow for doubt, failure and chance.

Paul Beumer received his BFA from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and completed a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. In 2019 he will be a resident at 16/16 in Lagos, Nigeria and Schoolhouse in Mutianyu, China. Recent solo exhibitions include He wanted kisses, but all he got was analytical anecdotes and philosophic epigrams at Handscape in Taipei, The message of the flower is the flower at Dürst Britt & Mayhew, Paint Wide Mouth White at Qingyun International Art Centre in Beijing, In the shade of the elms and willows, my friends drink until they are inspired at Goethe Pavillon, Palais Schardt in Weimar and Tomorrow’s Harvest at Bosse & Baum in London. He participated in major group exhibitions at Museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen, Museum Kranenburgh in Bergen, Museum De Paviljoens in Almere and the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague.

Work by Beumer is held in private and public collections, including the AKZO Nobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam; The Academic Medical Centre Art Collection, Amsterdam; the Collection of the District Court of Law, Amsterdam; the KRC Collection, Voorschoten, Netherlands. In 2009 Beumer received a nomination for the Royal Award for Contemporary Painting.

Through subtle exaggeration and performative interventions Alex Farrar likes to expose stereotypical human mechanisms. Whether a photograph, mural or a modified sofa hovering from a wall, they are outward looking, self-conscious additions that playfully interrupt their context and the viewer with a proposition. He manipulates ordinary objects for their performative potential. Acknowledging a lack of absolute control he creates the conditions for something to happen, the outcome of this happening isn’t fixed but depends completely on the engagement with viewers, location and duration.

Alex Farrar (UK, 1986) received BFA’s from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and Leeds Metropolitan University, after which he completed a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Secondary Emotions (i)’, de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam, ‘Secondary Emotions (ii)’ at Dürst Britt & Mayhew, ‘Code Duello’, Loods 6, Amsterdam, and ‘Self-Titled’ at Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Prospects and Concepts’, Art Rotterdam, ‘Summer Fete’, Ceri Hand Gallery, London, ‘Mostyn Open 18’, Oriel Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno, ‘Young British Art II’, DIENSTGEBÄUDE, Zurich. Both in 2014 and 2015 he won The Best Dutch Book Designs for two of his publications. In 2018 Alex Farrar will have a solo exhibition at Onomatopee, Eindhoven.

Jacqueline de Jong (1939) is revered for founding, editing and publishing The Situationist Times in the 1960s. By now her publishing, painting and sculpture endeavours have spanned over five decades. Her longterm involvement and collaboration with Asger Jorn and the legacy of the Cobra movement shine through, but have never stifled the experimental nature of her artistic practice, which is as vital, provocative and contradictory as ever.

Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Imaginary Disobedience’ at Château Shatto in Los Angeles and ‘Potato Blues’ at onestar press in Paris. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Section Littéraire’ at Kunsthalle Bern, ‘Medusa: Jewellery and Taboos’ at Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, ‘The Leftovers’ at Simon Lee Gallery in New York, ‘The Avant Garde won’t give up: Cobra and its legacy’ at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles and ‘Traces – 100 years Asger Jorn’ at Cobra Museum for Modern Art in Amstelveen. Her work is held in various museums and public collections including: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Cobra Museum for Modern Art, Amstelveen; Museum Jorn, Silkeborg; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; Kunstmuseum Göteborg; Lenbachhaus, Munich; MCCA Toronto; Centre Pompidou, Paris. In 2019, De Jong will have a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Interviews and features

Interview in NRC (Dutch)

Lennart Lahuis (1986) received his BFA from the Artez Institute of the Arts in Zwolle in 2011. From 2011 to 2013 he was a resident at de Ateliers in Amsterdam and he recently concluded residencies at the EKWC in Oisterwijk and the Glasgow Sculpture Studios. Recent duo and solo exhibitions by Lennart Lahuis include Dead Seconds with Willem Oorebeek at Shanaynay in Paris, Navigation at Dürst Britt & Mayhew and False Light at Apice for Artists in Amsterdam. Recent group exhibitions include A Minor State of Flux at Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam and Slow Works at Sydney Project Space, Sydney, Australia, Fortune Teller in Garage Rotterdam and Asleep Fingers in Kunstraum Düsseldorf. In 2015 Lahuis won the Royal Award for Contemporary Painting as well as the Piket Art Prize. His work is held in private and public collections, including the Fries Museum, Akzo Nobel Art Foundation, the collection of the Academic Medical Center (AMC) in Amsterdam and the ING collection. Lennart Lahuis will have his first museum solo-show in the fall of 2018 at The Fries Museum in Leeuwarden. He is living and working in Paris.

The work of Alexandre Lavet plays with the idea of emptiness, disappearance and erasure. Under the apparent homogeneity of exhibition spaces lie the details that mark the uniqueness and specificity of each place. It is these elements that Alexandre Lavet wants to bring to light, thereby making the viewer more aware of the environment surrounding him.

Alexandre Lavet (1988) received both his BFA and MFA from the École Supérieure d’Art in Clermont-Ferrand (France) and is currently living and working in Brussels. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Vision’ at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, ‘Run Run Run’ at Villa Arson in Nice, ‘(In)territories/rituals’ at TARS Gallery in Bangkok and ‘The Context’ at Museum Flehite in Amersfoort.

The work of Joseph Montgomery has the structure and syntax of sculpture, but it simultaneously has all the trappings of painting: wood, canvas, various types of coating and paint. The blurring and confounding of classification lends it a strange sense of hybridity. Joseph Montgomery ’s expansion of abstract painting results in two distinctive types of painting: collages and shims.

Joseph Montgomery (1979, Northampton, MA, US) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Via degli Eremiti at CAR DRDE in Bologna, Rules for Coyote at Dürst Britt & Mayhew, DOLLS (with Sherrie Levine) at Paula Cooper Gallery, Heads, Calves at Laurel Gitlen, Doll Index at Peter Blum Gallery and Five Sets Five Reps at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). His work was also shown in the seminal group exhibition Painter Painter at The Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis. Work by Montgomery is held in private and public collections, including the Centraal Museum Utrecht.

Raúl Ortega Ayala (1973) studied Painting at ‘La Esmeralda’ in Mexico City after which he traveled to the Glasgow School of Art for a Master in Fine Arts. During his master’s degree, he moved away from painting and veered his practice towards Anthropology and began working with the ethnographic method of ‘participant observation.’ Since then, Ortega Ayala has purposefully immersed himself for periods of one or two years in various different contexts such as the office world, food and gardening. This resulted in three different series, titled: ‘Bureaucratic Sonata, An Ethnography on Gardening, and Food for Thought’. He is currently exploring other methodologies used in History and Archaeology for an ongoing series ‘From the Pit of Etc.’ devoted to the concept of absence, trace, and iconoclasm. Raúl Ortega Ayala is currently living and working in Wellington, New Zealand.

Recent group exhibitions include ‘Stirring the Pot of Story’ at the Delfina Foundation in London, ‘Silent Light’ at Dürst Britt & Mayhew, ‘True Story’ at Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City and ‘Yes Naturally’ at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in The Hague. Solo exhibitions include ‘Living Remains’ at Stroom Den Haag and ‘Melting Pots’ at Rokeby Gallery in London. Work by Raúl Ortega Ayala is held in private and public collections, including the David Roberts Art Foundation, the AkzoNobel Art Foundation and the VandenBroek Foundation.

Pieter Paul Pothoven (1981) is a multimedia artist who engages with historical sites, artifacts and resources in order to mediate new relationships with the past, often based on the potential use value of these locations and objects in the present. He received his BFA at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and his MFA at Parsons The New School for Design, New York. He was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown (US) and a resident at the Instituto Sacatar in Salvador, Brazil. In 2014 and 2015 he was a participant at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht.

Recent exhibitions with Pieter Paul Pothoven include Territorial Drift at Garage Rotterdam, Listen to the stones, think like a mountain at Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, Lapis Lazuli from Serr-I-Sang at PuntWG, Amsterdam, 11:59 at Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Provincetown and The Intelligence of Things at The Kitchen, New York. His writings have been published by De Internet Gids, Volume and by the International Center of Photography in collaboration with CCS Bard. Work by Pothoven is held in private and public collections, including the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, Akzo Nobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam and the Van Lanschot Art Collection, The Hague.

Sybren Renema (1988) is active as an artist, writer and musician. After receiving his BFA from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, he became the youngest MFA student to ever enroll at the Glasgow School of Art. Sybren Renema is interested in the obscure corners of all forms of human discourse, with a particular liking for art, history, geographical exploration and the natural sciences. These different interests are often combined in the same work, highlighting an interest in unconventional forms of knowledge-production as well as a sense of the absurd and the grotesque.
 Recent solo exhibitions include The Harvest of Leisure at Cydonia, Dallas,  The Milk of Paradise at Dürst Britt & Mayhew, Pleasures of a Grave Desire at CCA Glasgow and Objective Onomatopoeia at the Glasgow Project Room. Work by Renema is held in private and public collections, including the AMC Collection, Amsterdam and the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden. In 2017 his work was on show in the Antarctic Pavilion as part of the Venice Biennial.

Puck Verkade‘s work at large reconsiders biological and cultural archetypes of gender, sexuality and cultural identity in relation to the abuse of power. Her videos and installations probe at how these phenomena of the human condition are generated, manipulated and mediated through mass media and pop culture. Non- linearity, humour and absurdity are used as affective tools to draw the viewer into a vortex of multiple considerations. The collage-like videos cross reference between fiction and fact, by mixing past, present and future perspectives.

Puck Verkade (1987, NL) received her BFA from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and recently completed her MFA Fine Art with distinction at Goldsmiths University, London. Her work has been shown internationally at various venues, such as Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Berlin Feminist Film Festival, If So What?/Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, Gasworks in London, and LOOP in Barcelona. Forthcoming projects in 2018 include a solo show at Art Night London and an artist commission for Daata Editions. Verkade’s work is held in private and public collections, including the AKZO Nobel Art Foundation in Amsterdam. She lives and works in London, where she has been selected as a resident artist at Sarabande The Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation for 2017–2018. 

The strength that lies in simple and everyday objects is often the starting point for Wieske Wester’s work. These are images without masks that appeal by their lack of visual violence and spectacle, but are nevertheless characterized by a certain degree of ambiguity. Wester’s paintings and drawings depict the human desire for identity, yet are peppered with references to aggression and sexuality. Fruit, vegetables, fish and figures that hover between beast and man regularly pass in review. For Wester the physical act of painting and drawing is the most direct way to capture the fluidity and forcefulness of the human spirit.

Wieske Wester (1985, NL) obtained her BFA from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, after which she was selected for a two-year residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. In 2015 she graduated from the HISK in Ghent. In 2017 she was nominated for the Royal Prize for Contemporary Painting in Amsterdam. Her work has been shown internationally at various venues such as White Crypt in London and the 6th Moscow Biennale for Art. Forthcoming projects in 2018 include a group exhibition at CODA Museum in Apeldoorn, Netherlands and a duo show with Jacqueline de Jong at Dürst Britt & Mayhew. Wester’s work is held in private and public collections, including the Lisser Art Museum in Lisse, Netherlands and the Ahold collection in Amsterdam. She lives and works in The Hague, Netherlands.