PAN Amsterdam Galerie Fleur & Wouter

Koos Buster (Amsterdam, NL, 1991) graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2018 with the presentation of his already legendary Grote Koos Buster museum. In his work he is always looking for the perfect doltish perfection or something trivial that deserves to be celebrated. When he has an idea, he starts to sketch it. He sees these sketches as a first phase of a new idea, but also as a work in itself. The 'clumsiness' of a quick sketch often has the lines he wants to see in the final work.

His work consists of several series. In Galerie Fleur & Wouter he previously exhibited his ornamental plates of almost everything that Koos Buster does not like to see. These vary from everyday actions such as brushing your teeth, or dishes such as risotto, to politicians, footballers and natural disasters. The charm of the series lies in the sweet way in which Buster brings his message, combined with the deliberately clumsy way of painting and sculpting ("I can sculpt much better than I show").

Buster also captures everyday objects life-size in clay. Here, too, his choice of subject is special. For example, he already made an overturned scooter, water coolers (which actually work) and a security camera. And here too his naughty sense of humour, special craftsmanship and distinctive own style can be seen.

Koos Buster (1991) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. His work has been exhibited in various museums, such as the Glass Museum, Museum Beelden aan Zee and the Frans Hals Museum. After graduating, Buster' also showed his work in various galleries, including Fons Welters and Galerie Fleur & Wouter. Het Parool has written several pieces about Buster's work, and articles about his work have also been published in De Volkskrant, NRC, Vice and Mister Motley, among others. His work has been included in various private and corporate collections, including those of AkzoNobel and Allen & Overy. In 2019 he was awarded the Glasstipendium Stichting Stokroos. In 2020 he was on of the participants in Unfair and Room on the Roof, the artist in residency project of de Bijenkorf in Amsterdam.

Dodi Espinosa (MX, 1985) is an interdisciplinary artist originating from the vibrant heart of Mexico City, where the colourful tapestry of archeology, shamanism and syncretism shaped his worldview and artistic sensibility. Now a Belgian citizen he calls Antwerp his home. His creations encompass performance, installation, objects, painting, workshops, among others. Each infused with inspirations from archaeology, sacral art, pop and indigenous cultures, and his characteristic tongue in cheek.

His works have earned places in institutional and museum collections in both Belgium and the Netherlands. This acknowledgment not only underscores his reputation but also amplifies the cross-cultural dialogues he aims to cultivate.

The artworks of Espinosa are more than just visual expressions; they are profound messages and calls to societal awakening. He reflects on a myriad of societal challenges, from mental health and identity to race and sexuality. His art acts as a bridge, linking the past with the present, the deeply personal with the universal. As a queer voice with a postcolonial lens, he offers a unique and confessional perspective, pushing boundaries and prompting deeper introspection on issues that touch us all.

While his initial work gravitated towards object-based art, his recent endeavours over the last years reflect a conceptual shift towards social experimentation, installation, performance and a more collective paradigm.

Dodi Espinosa had a solo exhibition at Beautiful Distress, Amsterdam (2022). He also took part in group exhibitions in M HKA (in collaboration with. NICC), Antwerp (2019), the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (NL, 2020), W139, Amsterdam (2020) and Mu.Zee, Ostend (2019 and 2022). His work is incorporated in the collections of Fries Museum, Mu.Zee, Museum van de Geest and the AkzoNobel art collection.

The sculptures of Warre Mulder (Borgerhout, 1984) draw from things as diverse as mythological literature and popular culture such as comics. Timeless motifs and characters from different, often culturally distant contexts, combine to form new constellations of meaning. The sculptures he creates from wood or acrylic resin sometimes appear somewhat awkward due to enlarged limbs or comical faces, but are at the same time serious and poignant.

The crocodile figure refers to both Ammit from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead and the devouring monster often depicted in Christianity at the Last Judgement. Both are figures that seek to evoke an image of fear in the viewer and thereby enforce virtuous behaviour. In this version, there is no judging god but nature, which always has the last word.

This work, as the title indicates, is an accumulation of memories. The palm was made into a transportable object in a plant pot and brought here from an exotic place. Delftware is a typical Dutch ceramic technique but has its origins as an imitation of Eastern poselein. So for me, the work is about identity and the tension between nurturing or possessing one another. Below it is a colonial tiger rug with a ground plane with modernist features.

Unfolding a tea box provided Saar Scheerlings (Eindhoven, NL, 1990) a form. She decided to paint it the way she saw at a weavers' village in the Himalayas. These forms took on a life of their own they led to sculptures and most recently to thrones. Saar builds to the material culture of a fictitious civilization. Inspired by ethnographic collections in museums, textile crafts and building methods the work is a search for a sense of inspiration and meaning such as we know from ancient cultures and religious artifacts like Talismans. In doing so, Saar looks at traditional ways of making. She works with second-hand materials such as mattresses from a bankrupt holiday park, fabrics from old theaters and from fashion brands or clothes from thrift stores. In in contrast to the speed and technologization of today's society, Saar's sculptures are a plea for craftsmanship and durability. The special fabrics in her sculptures get where they are straight to have a life as a work of art.

After graduating from Design Academy Eindhoven, Saar Scheerlings (NL, 1990) set out on a path that has led to the creation of visual art. Her art is an endless mill of production, constantly susceptible to outside influences. It is a process like a trade route or port where all kinds of previously unknown things can influence each other. Her work has been shown in various international museum shows, such as Zuiderzeemuseum, Fries Museum, Design Museum Gent and Dutch Parade, Hanwha Galleria Seoul, South Korea. Saar lives and works in the remote village of Le Maupas in Sussey, France.

Carmen Schabracq (Amsterdam, NL, 1988) creates paintings, sculptural installations, masks and performances in which the theatricality of life plays an important role. She gathers stories from various myths, traditions and her own experiences and uses them to create collage-like visual narratives. The mask is a recurring object and theme in her work, which she uses to explore the complexity of human identity. A mask is a tool within a ritual or performance, to become 'the other' and she plays with this in various ways.

Her work is also a form of escapism because of the characters she places in spaces of colour. A way to briefly escape from this world and imagine yourself in another, full of playfulness and humour, to deal with the layered reality of life and death. Just as folkloric rituals and traditions do, for instance in the celebration of the seasons, to propitiate the gods, scare off demons and devils or celebrate fertility. Schabracq's work is a stylised theatre of her own cosmos, with references from art history and folklore such as costumes.

Carmen was born in Amsterdam (1988), where she now lives and works. In 2012 she obtained her BA in fine arts from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, after a year of painting studies at the Academia di Belle Arti in Rome. In 2015 she obtained her MA in theater costume design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, with a research and body of work she called 'naked masks'. In 2017-2018 she received the ‘new makers subsidy’ from the Performing Arts Fund NL, with which she made two in situ performances in Zeeland. Her work has been shown in several museums, like Stedelijk Museum Breda, Museum Tot Zover, Amsterdam and Nest, The Hague.

Tom Volkaert’s sculptural work is a testimony to the materiality of memory as much as it is an ongoing tribute to the spiritual and shamanic force of art. Born in Antwerp in 1989, Volkaert’s sculptural work is a carefully balanced combination of refined artistic craftsmanship and the strategic use of unpredictability that comes into play when working with enameled ceramics, epoxy, or oxidized metal. Many of his works consist of circles on legs, which the artist likes to call steering-wheels. These works are like totems: symbolic and organic artifacts that make present the otherworldly alien life in the cosmos and that put us in touch with something radically different from us. On the edges and inside these circles, contorted arachnoid limbs, intestines, and sickly satanic tongues are carefully arranged and held in suspended animation. It is as if these circles are portals to another cosmic dimension and something wholly other than human life is trying to get through, a lumpy otherworldly and alienated organic gesturing at us in a way that feels both familiar and estranging.

But Volkaert’s so-called steering wheels are also a totem for his own life and memories, a way of navigating and coming to terms with his own life. For Volkaert, colors embody memory. Personal memories first of all. And thus, the lived memory of the cinereous cigarette stains on the caput morteem colored carpet in his parent’s living room is reenacted and relived through the use of these colors in his work. But universal memories too. The usage of umbilical greyish pink and placenta-colored red appeal to a birthing process all of us have gone through; engaging with these colors, Volkaert’s sculptures establish a connection to the matrixial mother in which all creativity is situated, making the viewer receptive to the most intimate and estranging experience of being alive.

Conjuring up these contradictory feelings and holding them together is, ultimately, at the core of Volkaert’s artistic practice. Holding together contradictory sensations, his art opens a space where feelings of joy, surprise, wonder, and disgust are enclosed in the same ceramic totem or metal cut-out or epoxy statues.