Wieske Wester: The artist is not here, she is picking feathers

Wieske Wester‘s solo exhibition ‘The artist is not here, she is picking feathers’ focuses on still life imagery of a life lived in the countryside. Objects close to kitchen or garden are turned into images that hover between figuration and abstraction. Painted in her well known impasto, the cool freshness of for example pears is contrasted with the aggressive rawness of chicken meat. Large black and white drawings are constructed from a tangle of powerful strokes, which gradually reveal their subject matter. In the vein of the 17th century Dutch still life tradition, Wester has the ability to turn the mundane into an uncanny reality. Her ‘portraits’ of food explore their subjects in their visual appearances as well as in their biological, organic and spiritual state. Themes of sensuality, eroticism and death, are executed in an artistic handwriting which is vitally guided by the power of nature and at the same time exposes that natural force.

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. Recent projects include group exhibitions at Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem and CODA Museum in Apeldoorn, Netherlands and duo shows with Jacqueline de Jong and Katerina Sidorova at Dürst Britt & Mayhew. Her work has been shown internationally at various venues such as White Crypt in London and the 6th Moscow Biennale for Art and presented by Dürst Britt & Mayhew at LISTE Art Fair Basel, NADA Miami and Independent Brussels. Wester’s work is held in private and public collections, including the LAM in Lisse, Netherlands, Ahold Collection, Rabobank Collection, and the Pedro Moraes Barbosa Collection in Brazil.