Nelleke Cloosterman
‘Between What Is Ours’
12.06.2025 — 19.07.2025
PLUS-ONE Projects presents the upcoming solo exhibition by Nelleke Cloosterman.
In Nelleke Cloosterman’s paintings, worlds fall over one in gossamer layers of oil paint. Existing both within and apart from each other, they explore different times and realms, defying the natural order of the world. Ghostly impressions of figures, landscapes and animals impart themselves from one to the next, imposing new connotations on the layers that follow and vice-versa. Birds, once perched, become suspended in wingless flight; a chaise lounge is replaced by a forest floor; birds from each continent exist together in one tree; sisters reach for each other across thresholds, somehow together and somehow apart. At points, these disruptions are eerie, at others filled with wonder. Bubbles, longstanding imagery representing the transience of human life and joy, become un-poppable, acting as windows between one world and the next.
There's a consistent sense of limbo-like place across the paintings. A return to a forest or natural world that's just out of reach, it’s unclear if this is one space or many, or an amalgamation re-imagined and cut together. Particular pieces turn to the more abstract layers of the artist's worlds, shifting the paintings so that they skirt to the edges and expose the linen underneath. We can see here where they sit skewed off of each other, exposing the edges of their boundaries. Where do these worlds begin and end, do they stop at the linen or expand past the paint? Do the stitched together panels become bends and divides and fractures? Where does this place the viewer, does our world become an extension of the painted ones?
(Excerpt of the exhibition text written by Olivia Rumsey, 2025)
Nelleke Cloosterman, Irresistible, 2024, Oil on linen, 55 × 45 cm
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Nelleke Cloostermen (°1996) lives and works in London, United Kingdom (UK).
Nelleke Cloosterman’s recent works are mainly composed of what she calls modern-day vanitas paintings. With added elements compared to her previous still life vocabulary and a wider colour palette, both reflecting life in the city, the paintings turn around the precepts of the classical genre. Although inscribed in this art tradition with reminders of life’s fragility, the works here exhibited are not meant to convey moralistic messages. The notions of faulty life goals and futility of earthly pleasures, typical of the historical Christian depictions, are more truly embraced in their ordinariness, a human experience as much as any other. Moreover, the artist aims to escape from the rigidity of proclaimed meanings and let the viewer find their own ways within this fragmentary collage-like realm, as does the wingless yet flying bird which is a major symbol in Cloosterman's practice that could be seen as a self-portrait.
The combination of familiar objects that are not likely to be seen together (beer, vases from the British museum, cats, etc.) set in an indeterminate spacetime borders a surrealist take on reality. In fact, it is but the paintings’ more visible layer. Through transparency, images of open portals and windows, as well as through bas reliefs of scratched drawings on the underlayer, one can catch a glimpse of this other world of gradients, bubbles, branches, and flowers. Whether metaphysical, spiritual, or utopic, this representation appears intertwined with that of the mundane. Seemingly, the series proposes less of a dialectic approach of opposing sides, and more of a concession to their part in human experience. Estranged from a devout religious upbringing, the artist’s wish for openness in meaning reinforces the understanding that, as a construct, it is subject to change. A single concept cannot account for life and the world.
Olivia Rumsey, 2025
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Exhibition: 12.06.2025 - 19.07.2025
12.06.2025 18u30 - 19u: Performance by Nelleke Cloosterman, ‘cut piece’
PLUS-ONE Projects
Vlaamsekaai 73
2000 Antwerp (BE)
