THe time is now – roos van dijk
11/11/22 – 08/12/22

Roos van dijk
Roos van Dijk (1989) studied Fine Arts at Artez Institute of the Arts in Arnhem (NL) and completed one semester at the painting department of Sint-Lukas Brussels University College of Art and Design (BE). After her graduation in 2012, she received a Starters Stipendium from the Dutch Mondrian Fund, a subsidy for young art talents. In 2013 she joined the artist-in-residence programme of K.A.I.R. Košice Artist In Residence (SK). Additionally, her work was nominated for The Dutch Royal Award for Modern Painting in 2013 and 2014.
In summer 2016, after four years of successfully working as a fine artist from her studio in Amsterdam, she joined the ‘Master of Fine Arts’ programme of the Frank Mohr Institute, Groningen (NL), direction: painting. She graduated successfully in July 2018. Her work is part of corporate and private art collections in The Netherlands and abroad.
In van Dijk’s abstract, geometrical work, the materials take on a prominent role, informing her actions during creation. She works with the material and the material works with her; you could call it a form of collaboration.
Intentional and accidental processes alternate, an intuitive and playful process that leads towards the final shape of the art piece. This makes every work a renewed investigation into the formal and tangible qualities of the material and its affordances; the dynamics of the medium, such as colour, line, shape, scale, application, and their effect and possible affect on the viewer in a presentation. On the one hand, van Dijk is using the pictorial space of the canvas to create a subtle illusion, a parallel world of familiar geometric shapes and architecture-inspired patterns and colours that the viewer can enter. On the other hand, she emphasizes the flatness and material body of the painting. Grids, hard-edge lines and painterly gestures mark the surface of the canvas and stress the formal physicality of the piece.
In addition to working on unusual fabrics, she uses found materials in her work, drawing inspiration from traces of former use and seeking to give a second life to things that other people discard as waste.