Remy Jungerman was born in 1959 in Moengo, Suriname
He lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Remy Jungerman attended the Academy for Higher Arts and Cultural Studies in Paramaribo, Suriname, before moving to Amsterdam where he studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. In his work, Jungerman explores the intersection of pattern and symbol in Surinamese Maroon culture, the larger African Diaspora, and 20th Century “Modernism.” In bringing seemingly disparate visual languages into conversation, Jungerman’s work challenges the established art historical canon. As art and culture critic Greg Tate has remarked “Remy Jungerman’s work leaps boldly and adroitly into the epistemological gap between culturally confident Maroon self-knowledge and the Dutch learning curve around all things Jungerman, Afropean and Eurocentric.”

Born and raised in Suriname, Remy Jungerman is a descendant, on his mother side, of the Surinamese Maroons who escaped enslavement on Dutch plantations to establish self-governed communities in the Surinamese rain forest. Within their rich culture, many West-African influences are preserved including the prominent use of abstract geometrical patterns. Placing fragments of Maroon textiles, as well other materials found in the African diaspora such as the kaolin clay used in many African religious traditions or the nails featured in West African Nkisi Nkondi power sculpture, in direct contact with materials and imagery drawn from more “established” art traditions, Jungerman presents a peripheral vision that can enrich and inform our perspective on art history.

Remy Jungerman’s work is included in various collections: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands, Kunstmuseum, The Hague, The Netherlands, Zeeuws Museum, Middelburg, The Netherlands, ABN AMRO Collection, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Rennie Museum, Vancouver, Canada, Art Omi, Ghent, New York, USA, US Embassy, Paramaribo, Suriname, Hudson Vally MOCA, Peekskill, New York, USA, Francis Greenburger Collection, New York, USA, Saamaka Marron Museum, and various private collections.

In 2019, Jungerman represented the Netherlands at the 58th Venice Biennale with a the impressive Visiting Deities installation. Later that year, the artist had his introduction exhibition Neap Tide at Galerie Ron Mandos. In 2021-2022, Jungerman had a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, titled Behind the Forest.

Visit the website of the artist here.

Lieven Hendriks takes everyday subjects in which the human touch is visible as a starting point for his work. For example, he paints nails in walls, stars and vases cut out of paper, and finger drawings on foggy windows. By using trompe l’oeil effects, his flat canvases appear as loosely stretched linens, deceiving the eyes of the viewer. In his work, Lieven Hendriks, plays a game with the nature of observation. His paintings anticipate how we look at art, how we focus our attention, and how this process is affected by surrounding circumstances. In this way, his work touches directly on the essence of painting and the value attached to it.

Creating hyperreal illusions requires mastery of one’s technique. When seeking to deceive his audience, Hendriks pulls out all the stops to make his work absolutely lifelike. Nothing is allowed to interfere with the illusion. For the artist, painting amounts first and foremost to a conscious demonstration of the highest professional skill. He uses his technical virtuosity to make the viewer think about the way we are used to look at paintings. Although his images seem to be crystal clear at first, they actually make us doubt through their ambiguity.

Lieven Hendriks (1970) studied at the HKU in Utrecht and was a resident at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. His work is part of many renowned international collections, including Museum Voorlinden, ESMoA Los Angeles, and the Centraal Museum in Utrecht.

www.lievenhendriks.com

Born into a working class Afrikaans family during the height of Apartheid, Kendell Geers quickly found himself fighting a Crime Against Humanity on the front lines of activism and protest. Running away from the military regime and a six year prison sentence, he escaped to London in 1988 as a political refugee. In 1989 he moved on to New York where he found employ as Richard Prince’s full time assistant. Following the release of Nelson Mandela, Geers returned to South Africa in 1990 to help build the new democracy.

From his strong experiences as a revolutionary, he developed a psycho-social-political practice that held ethics and aesthetics to be opposite sides of the very same coin, spinning upon the tables of history. In his hands, the discourse of art history is interrogated, languages of power and ideological codes subverted, expectations smashed and belief systems transformed into aesthetic codes. The raw energy of a Punk attitude is blended with the visceral visionary philosophy of poets like Rimbaud, Blake and Burroughs in an uncanny cocktail of unexpected contrasts.

A European by descent, an African by birth, Kendell Geers work embodies the contradictions of his identity, being both Animist and Mystic, Shaman and Alchemist, Punk and Poet. The warp of popular culture is woven into the weft of poetry, painting, literature and ritual. He uses experience to colour perception, spiritualising matter and materialising spirit, mocking tradition like an iconoclast whilst celebrating history like a Medieval Monk.

Believing that art is as political as it is spiritual, Kendell Geers’ varied practice cannot be simplified, cannot be reduced to cliché or fashion. Working as an artist, musician, designer and writer, his strategies are without compromise because he believes that “Art changes the world – one perception at a time.”

Kendell Geers was born in May 1968, Johannesburg, South Africa
He lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Boris Tellegen (NL, 1968) began his artistic career in the 1980s, using his pseudonym DELTA. As a Graffiti artist, Tellegen treated the two-dimensional frame of the letter and the word as sculpture, bursting out or morphing into the wall, piercing its boundaries by adding a dimension. By combining the reliefs of his practice with his education in industrial design, he soon started to create three-dimensional work on the intersection of architecture, painting, sculpture and installation.

In his body of work made over a thirty-year span, Tellegen explores how to transcend the boundaries of walls by annexing, deconstructing and recomposing them, to ultimately disregard them in recent installations. Through the ever-fluctuating shape of his work, Tellegen continues to disrupt our perception of surface and space.

Boris Tellegen received his education in Industrial Design Engineering at the Technical University of Delft (NL, 1988-94). Tellegen has exhibited widely in European, North American and Australian museums, institutions and galleries. Recent exhibitions include MIMA, Brussels (BE, 2017), Les Abattoirs, Toulouse (FR, 2016), Amsterdam Museum (NL, 2015) and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (FR, 2014). Tellegen regularly creates commissioned sculptures in the public spaces. A recent example is a series of sculptures between Amersfoort and Utrecht in the framework of De Stijl’s centenary celebration (NL, 2017).

Boris Tellegen (1968) was born in 1968, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
He lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

www.deltainc.nl

Bouke de Vries (1960) was born in Utrecht, NL
He lives and works in London, UK

Bouke de Vries studied at the Design Academy  Eindhoven, and Central St Martin’s, London. After working with John Galliano, Stephen Jones and Zandra Rhodes, he switched careers and studied ceramics conservation and restoration at West Dean College. Every day in his practice as a private conservator he was faced with issues and contradictions around perfection and worth: “The Venus de Milo’ is venerated despite losing her arms, but when a Meissen muse loses a finger she is rendered virtually worthless.”

Using his skills as a restorer (c.f. Ron Mueck’s model-maker skills), his ‘exploded’ artworks reclaim broken pots after their accidental trauma. He has called it ‘the beauty of destruction’. Instead of reconstructing them, he deconstructs them. Instead of hiding the evidence of this most dramatic episode in the life of a ceramic object, he emphasises their new status, instilling new virtues, new values, and moving their stories forward.

The more contemplative works echo the 17th- and 18th-century still-life paintings of his Dutch heritage, especially the flower paintings of the Golden Age, a tradition in which his hometown of Utrecht was steeped (de Heem, van Alst, van Huysum inter alia), with their implied decay. By incorporating contemporary items a new vocabulary of symbolism evolves.

These ‘dead natures’ – natures morts – give everyday household objects, a plate, a milk jug, a teapot, a modern poignancy that refers back to the vanitas and memento mori paintings of that period. An installation in de Vries’s London house is arranged in the manner of Daniel Marot with white Delft domestic pottery rescued in fragments from 17th- and 18th-century rubbish tips, now dug up and partially pieced together. Among them are two small artists’ paint pots with the pigment still in them, as possibly once used by – who knows? – Vermeer or Rembrandt.

Born in 1965 in Alphen aan den Rijn, NL
Lives and works in Rotterdam, NL

Geert Mul has been exploring for over 25 years the possibilities of a poetry in the language of new media. This resulted in a flow of experimental artworks in a wide range of media: prints, light-objects, video and interactive/generative computer installations. In Mul’s works, the interrelationship between technology, media and perception is a central theme. Mul’s practice engages the broader public through commissioned artworks in public space.

Geert Mul studied art from 1985 -1990 at the HKA Arnhem where he graduated with computer animations, video and kinetic sculptures. After his studies, he traveled in Mexico, the United States and Asia. He resided for one year in Tokyo. Since 1993 Mul lives and works in Rotterdam, Holland. In the mid-1990s, Mul became one of the first VJ’s, in the alternative Techno scene. These events grew into interactive audio-visual environments, commissioned artworks and installations which were exhibited in a variety of contexts: public space, museums and festivals. Mul has produced over 20 commissioned art installations and exhibited at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen Rotterdam, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto Japan, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia Madrid, Institute Valencia Arte Moderne, Museum of contemporary Art Chicago.

Geert Mul teaches “Unstable Media” at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (DogTime).

Levi van Veluw was born in the city of Hoevelaken in 1985. He lives and works near Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Over the past 15 years, Van Veluw has produced a diverse and evolving oeuvre that is exhibited all around the world. He is known for installations, sculptures, drawings, and autobiographical films that draw from his childhood memories. From the depths of his memory, the artist unearths images that provoke universal emotions and question our human logic. Van Veluw plays with elements of order and chaos, posing to the viewer questions about our obsessive pursuit of control.

Van Veluw creates his works with extreme care and craftsmanship; his sculptures of clay and wood are made entirely by hand, giving them an authentic, coarse, and organic character. His intricately built-up charcoal drawings show great symmetry and harmony, whilst his remarkable use of light evokes a strong, meditative mood. The installations by Van Veluw offer intense and immersive experiences. In the past, he has built complete, though fictional cathedrals – amongst other dark and sensory spaces built of obscure forms and materials. Visitors that enter Van Veluw’s alternate realities become disassociated from their existing spatial interpretations. They experience a disruptive environment where both order and chaos live one amongst the other.

The work of Van Veluw has been exhibited internationally in leading museums and institutions worldwide, such as the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Ars Electronica, Linz; Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico City; Design Museum, London; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and Marres House for Contemporary Culture, Maastricht, amongst others. His work is included in both public and private collections, such as the Borusan Collection, Istanbul; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; Museum MORE, Gorssel; the KPMG Art Collection, Amstelveen; the Ekard Collection, Wassenaar; the Lakeside Collection, Rotterdam, and Cobra to Contemporary/The Brown Family Collection.

Additionally, Van Veluw has worked on commissions for private clients. Within these commissions he has undertaken many collaborations. In 2012, Van Veluw worked alongside curator Marc Coetzee on the film “Family”, produced as part of the “Films4peace” project. In 2014, working alongside Hermès, Van Veluw created a life-sized site-specific installation for one of their main windows in Shanghai. Van Veluw has also participated in international film festivals, including Addis Foto Fest, Addis Ababa; Afrika Film festival, Leuven; Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, Port of Spain, and West Midlands Human Rights Film Festival, Birmingham.

Hans Op de Beeck was born in 1969 in Turnhout, Belgium. He lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

Hans Op de Beeck produces large installations, sculptures, films, drawings, paintings, photographs and texts. His work is a reflection on our complex society and the universal questions of meaning and mortality that resonate within it. He regards man as a being who stages the world around him in a tragi-comic way. Above all, Op de Beeck is keen to stimulate the viewers’ senses, and invite them to really experience the image. He seeks to create a form of visual fiction that delivers a moment of wonder and silence.

Over the past twenty years Op de Beeck realized numerous monumental ‘sensorial’ installations, in which he evoked what he describes as ‘visual fictions’: tactile deserted spaces as an empty set for the viewer to walk through or sit down in, sculpted havens for introspection. In many of his films though, in contrast with those depopulated spaces, he prominently depicts anonymous characters.

Hans Op de Beeck was born in Turnhout in 1969. He lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Op de Beeck has shown his work extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world.

Ron van der Ende is a sculptor living in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He specializes in wall mounted bas-reliefs constructed from found wood. The original color and texture of the wood is utilized to form a gripping and realistic mosaic. The realism is further enhanced by the perspective built into the relief. Van der Ende uses his method to conjure up dark industrial and space age imagery.

Works by Ron van der Ende have been exhibited a.o. at Ambach & Rice Gallery, Dallas, Museum; Voorlinden, Wassenaar; de Kunsthal, Rotterdam; Kuenstlerhaus, Dortmund; Groninger Museum, Groningen; Stadthausgalerie, Munster; Dallas Art Fair; The Armory Show in New York; OkOk Gallery in Seattle, and Ampelhaus in Oranienbaum.