Arjan van Helmond
20 January - 5 March
Reception for the artist Thursday 27 January 6.30-8.30 pm - Shop

Arjan van Helmond paints scenes which resonate with the presence of people, but from which their inhabitants are absent. Working mostly on a small scale he paints onto paper with acrylic, gouache, watercolour and ink. He uses each medium with an acute control of its properties: a surface breaks to reveal conflicting underpainting; the gentle seep of watercolour or ink jars harshly with the blank opacity of an area of gouache. The scenes he chooses are often domestic or architectural, buildings which in their very structure, or in the decorative details which define their surfaces, bear signs of habitation, but stand invariably deserted.

Van Helmond works from photographs, and his working process consists in effecting subtle changes to each image until it takes on an element of the strange or the uncanny. Many of his subjects appear fragile, they have a clear origin in reality but have been pushed away from the realm of the real to occupy something like the realm of the dream.

Arjan van Helmond lives and works in Amsterdam. This will be his first solo exhibition at the gallery. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam and the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht and recently completed a residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam and in 2003 he undertook a residency in Jakarta, Indonesia. Exhibitions include Unfortunately last Sunday afternoon somebody left the door open... Museum Het Domein, Sittard, NL, A pallid house W139, Amsterdam, NL, and Don’t be a Stranger, Galerie Juliette Johngma, Amsterdam. His work is represented in the collections of ABN Amro, De Nederlansche Bank, Akzo Nobel and in private collections throughout Europe.

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