WTC Rotterdam Art Gallery

The artist's work is inextricably intertwined between fantasy and reality. The paintings and works on paper reveal the power of women when they depict something—sometimes bordering on the dark—about power, rituals, and our relationship to others. With a base of pencil and charcoal, Marie Louise Elshout paints her figures in oil, which oscillate between human and animal. In dark, layered works, she primarily reveals the vulnerability of human existence. Christina de Vos employs various techniques in large series of drawings, paintings, and objects, in which she thoroughly explores a subject that is personal to her and therefore essential. Arie van Geest paints an almost hallucinatory, delusional world in which his creatures balance between reality and dream. In the series "The Broken Promised Land," it is primarily Alice who gives meaning to this wondrous world. Gallery curator Astrid de Pauw brings these artists together because, according to her, all three are searching—using imagination as a weapon (or perhaps as a shield?)—for a way to survive in a difficult-to-understand and dangerous world.

Gallery curator Astrid de Pauw brings these artists together through her passion for drawings and works on paper. She particularly hopes to convey the intensity of the works, partly because the series is often shown in a limited selection. In contrast, now they can be experienced in their full scope.

The approach, working method, and visualisation reveal the unique signature and the equally important driving force of the artists. A common thread is that the works do not stand alone, but are created in relation to one another and in response to one another, in a grand, interconnected series of drawings. Work that, in its quantity, scale, and meaning, invites one to slow down and look at it in personal silence. Marco Douma presents two large installations of drawings, stemming from series that previously served as source material for audiovisual works. Although movement and sound are now absent, they unmistakably show the passage of time. Hulya Yilmaz works from emotion in this large series of drawings, in which she explores a subject deeply personal to her. Esther Schoonhoven draws the light in dark underlayers, where every scratch and brushstroke forms a new sentence in a grander story.