Art Rotterdam

Trained at the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, Natacha Mankowski (Paris, FR, 1986) worked as an architect alongside Jean Nouvel and Vito Acconci before turning to painting. Her architectural background still resonates strongly in her paintings. Defying the boundaries between different artistic disciplines, Mankowski’s work is characterized by an exuberant use of the impasto technique. The way she employs this technique allows her to create textural and spatial structures in her paintings that moves them into the realm of sculpture. In her new work Natacha Mankowski has intensified this spatial and sculptural effect by working with larger formats. With many of these new paintings weighing 15 to 20 kilograms and more, they acquire a singular sense of gravity and presence; indeed, these paintings are objects that themselves inhabit a space alongside the viewers.

To address the question of how humans inhabit space at the intersection of nature and culture, Natacha Mankowski has developed her own visual and compositional language. While her compositions may seem abstract to the casual viewer, they are somewhat reminiscent of blueprints and ground maps widely used in architectural design and urban planning. This is no coincidence: many of her paintings are loosely inspired by the ground maps of the quarries she visited during her years as an architect.

Mankowski takes a keen interest in sites such as stone quarries, from which architects and builders collect their raw materials. Midway between nature and the built environment, quarries are transitional sites in which natural resources are excavated and turned into raw commodities to be used in buildings, but also cell phones, computers, and other modern technologies. So as much as we would like to believe we are far removed from nature, through these rough materials we are intrinsically connected to it. And as such, the mines and quarries where these materials are found also raise difficult questions about how humans have turned nature into a site for commodification, a process that has brought us high-tech and the urban environment but has also triggered ecological ruin and collapse.

Inspired by these issues, Mankowski has explored and visited many of these quarries, paying close attention to their geographical lay-out and the specific selection of raw materials on site. She then uses samples of these raw materials to create the thick impasto paint that texture her painterly work. (Words by Bram Ieven)

Natacha Mankowski has exhibited in numerous international exhibitions, such as: Zentrum fur Kunst ind Urbanistik (Berlin, GE) 2014 ; the Watermill Center (NY, USA) 2015, Pole muséal de Lisieux – Ateliers Intermédiaires (Lisieux, FR) 2015, Ceci Foundation (Berlin, GE) 2016, New Day Gallery (Berlin, GE) 2016, Souvenirs (Berlin, GE) 2016, the Epigraphic Museum (Athens, GR) 2018, Deschool and ISO (Amsterdam, NL), 2019, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble. She had several gallery shows at and is still working together with Everyday Gallery (2019 - 2022), Antwerp and Valerius Gallery (2022), Luxembourg City. She did a number of recidencies around the world and has been invited to teach at prestigious art schools like Sandberg Insitituut, Amsterdam. Mankowski is part of the Taylor Foundation in Paris and was the recipient of the Tony Garnier Prize, for Architecture and Urbanism awarded by the Académie Française d’Architecture in Paris.

Mirjam Vreeswijk's (Gorinchem, NL, 1997) paintings explore the convergence of divergent realities produced in a space between mirror and mask, between revealing and hiding the subject. In doing so, she seeks to draw attention to the different layers of consciousness rippling through the painting’s surface and its subject. Narrative and continuity become illusory in this hybrid space, as each work contains new perspectives that combine opposites and defy easy coherency.

The work originates from collages of objects or images that appeal to her in one way or another. For example, shiny ribbons, designer shoes and pictures from books on decorative works from the 70s. From this archive of materials, she intuitively builds compositions, first in models, then on canvas. Step by step, Mirjam looks at what the image needs in order to eventually arrive at the perfect composition and perfect structures of paint.

This intuitive or subconscious approach gives the paintings a surrealistic feel that touches on elements of product photography, still life and landscape painting. In her latest series the fairy-tale world makes its entrance. This can be seen in ritual objects and in the approach to landscapes that some of the paintings provide a glimpse of.

After graduating in 2018 from the HKU Bachelor of Fine Art, Mirjam Vreeswijk was nominated for several awards such as the Buning Brongers Prize and the Kunst aan de dijk Prize, she won the Best of Graduates Ron Mandos Public Prize that year. She then participated in the Master Fine Art at the Frank Mohr Institute. In 2019, she was named Art Talent of the Year by Stichting Kunstweek. She has exhibited in several galleries and at Kunstcollectie Rijnstate.

Plastic buckets, dolls, tin cans and furniture. They populate the scenes that artist Erik Mattijssen (Veenendaal, NL, 1957) builds in his drawings of pencil, gouache and pastel crayon. Like in a theatre, he tells stories, often set in interiors in which things take the leading role. People are absent. What happened there, the solidified life stories, thoughts and memories, are told in these tableaux vivants with props.

The artist fills his scenes - with great attention to detail - with objects, in an intuitive, collage-like manner. He works from an image archive he collected over the years. He owns folders full of images of flowers, toys, patterns and the canned goods his father sold as a salesman. Experiences from the many foreign residences where he stays also end up in his work. The colours of Kolkata, façade advertisements, tin cans with plants in Suriname and a grocery shop in Paris enrich his subjects and style.

The work conveys layered, sometimes contradictory feelings to the viewer, supported by his striking use of colour. Sometimes cheerful, sometimes melancholic; for a wooden stool or suitcase can conceal a faltering ambition. Loneliness is also an important theme, reflected in abandoned beds, cuddly toys and dolls that don't get love (anymore). Mattijssen keeps memories alive and taps into layers of our subconscious. Like the smell of madeleines Marcel Proust wrote about, that triggered a flow of memories. Painted and drawn on paper, his objects take you back to a lost time.

Mattijssen cradles us back and forth between recognition and alienation. Through abrupt cuts and playful perspective, bold colour combinations and through what we see. For why is that hippo hanging on a string above the mantelpiece? While looking at his work, you are left wondering. According to him, the highest achievement.

Erik Mattijssen has had solo exhibitions at museums such as Kunsthal Rotterdam, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Jan Cunen Oss and in 2025 at Museum More. His work is included in prestigious international museum, corporate and private collections, including those of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, AkzoNobel, the DELA, the UMC-Utrecht and the VandenBroek Foundation. He made in situ work for public places such as the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital, Amsterdam and won the NN Art Award. A committed and passionate teacher at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Mattijssen trained a generation of young artists.

Plastic buckets, dolls, tin cans and furniture. They populate the scenes that artist Erik Mattijssen (Veenendaal, NL, 1957) builds in his drawings of pencil, gouache and pastel crayon. Like in a theatre, he tells stories, often set in interiors in which things take the leading role. People are absent. What happened there, the solidified life stories, thoughts and memories, are told in these tableaux vivants with props.

The artist fills his scenes - with great attention to detail - with objects, in an intuitive, collage-like manner. He works from an image archive he collected over the years. He owns folders full of images of flowers, toys, patterns and the canned goods his father sold as a salesman. Experiences from the many foreign residences where he stays also end up in his work. The colours of Kolkata, façade advertisements, tin cans with plants in Suriname and a grocery shop in Paris enrich his subjects and style.

The work conveys layered, sometimes contradictory feelings to the viewer, supported by his striking use of colour. Sometimes cheerful, sometimes melancholic; for a wooden stool or suitcase can conceal a faltering ambition. Loneliness is also an important theme, reflected in abandoned beds, cuddly toys and dolls that don't get love (anymore). Mattijssen keeps memories alive and taps into layers of our subconscious. Like the smell of madeleines Marcel Proust wrote about, that triggered a flow of memories. Painted and drawn on paper, his objects take you back to a lost time.

Mattijssen cradles us back and forth between recognition and alienation. Through abrupt cuts and playful perspective, bold colour combinations and through what we see. For why is that hippo hanging on a string above the mantelpiece? While looking at his work, you are left wondering. According to him, the highest achievement.

Erik Mattijssen has had solo exhibitions at museums such as Kunsthal Rotterdam, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Jan Cunen Oss and in 2025 at Museum More. His work is included in prestigious international museum, corporate and private collections, including those of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, AkzoNobel, the DELA, the UMC-Utrecht and the VandenBroek Foundation. He made in situ work for public places such as the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital, Amsterdam and won the NN Art Award. A committed and passionate teacher at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Mattijssen trained a generation of young artists.