Anneke Wilbrink

For her first solo exhibition at Vegas Gallery, Dutch artist Anneke Wilbrink shows landscape paintings derived from source material including archived images, DVDs and photos taken while travelling. Never painted directly from life, Wilbrink’s landscapes are built up from labyrinthine, thread-like grids layered around patches of watery paint and blurred marks. These landscapes have no discernible beginning, centre or end. Many of them melt the boundaries between figurative and abstract; pattern/vistas that appear to extend beyond the edges of the frame. Others hint at waterside scenes, walkways bordered by trees and urban vistas incorporating bridges, gangways and skyscraper facades. Wilbrink’s paintings are influenced by the 17th century tradition of Dutch landscape art, whose prevalence of sea and river imagery often incorporating boats reflect the development of canals and water transport in Holland during that period, and of widespread land reclamation. Although they allude to specific geographies and are influenced by the artist’s nationality they cannot be pinned down to definable locations. Wilbrink’s palette of slate grays and turquoise to indigo blues evoke nameless, possibly European cities. Her grid-like architectural structures - buildings, bridges, urban interiors - could reside in any metropolis.
These structures sometimes resemble cellular nets of biological origin. Wilbrink says, “my relation to nature is … wide. I see a shopping mall, for instance, as a result of nature. That is our environment. When I visit the remains of Roman architecture … I can imagine it as just-built, contemporary architecture. Nature both inspires me and distracts me. But I could not paint architecture without my experience, and admiration, of nature.” She associates nature with eternity and architecture with human concepts of hope, endurance and beauty. But her paintings intertwine and erase divisions between categories of natural and man-made, and between categories of historical and contemporary, into shimmering, indeterminate surfaces woven with references to picturesque tourist art and various painterly traditions. They echo the tones and imagery of Turner’s work including swatches of brilliant, luminescent sky light, and the dripping lattices and smears of Pollock and de Kooning. Wilbrink asserts, though, that her paintings do not self consciously quote art historical styles. Instead, these references evolve organically from her immersion in the language and history of painting. Wilbrink’s work presents multiple views and perspectival points, reminiscent of camera shots and infused with tactility. Different marks and techniques - drips versus brush strokes, patches of blank colour versus crowded, bristling sections of canvas - mesh into each other. Some of her paintings have an otherworldly, science fiction quality, a strangeness overlaid with shifting light.

Anneke Wilbrink graduated from the Frank Mohr Institute, MF Groningen in 2004. Since then she has exhibited widely in a variety of European galleries and museums. In 2004 she was nominated for the Prix de Rome (drawing), and she received the Royal Dutch Award for painting in 2006.

Aline Duriaud © 2008