Overview

Pieter Slagboom's drawings are about life and death. About how these ostensible antagonists are inseparable; how, in his imagination, they are even fused. In his enormous canvases, we are held by the essence of our existence as though by a steel vise: we come from the void and in the end shall return to it. Thousands upon thousands of sweeping lines, twisting like Moebius strips, make for an almost physical experience of this truth. The dead and the newborn emerge from the primeval soup of Slagboom's lines, as do genitals; we spot larger-than-life fantasies of disturbing sexual acts. The circle of life as a short circuit. The energy of some of the pictures in Slagboom's oeuvre is almost too much to bear-- we shudder before the pigments materializing our latent knowledge: that death is suspended in life.

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9783969122501

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Estelle Hoy is a writer, art critic, and cultural theorist based in Berlin, Germany. Her debut novel, Pisti, 80 Rue de Belleville, was published in 2020 by After 8 Books, with an introduction by Chris Kraus. In 2024, she released a collection of essays titled saké blue. Her writing often appears in major art publications such as Mousse, Spike Art, Artforum, e-flux, Flash Art, and Frieze. Pieter Slagboom (born 1956, the Netherlands) lives and works in Middelburg, the Netherlands. In his artistic practice, he creates large, vividly drawn works that explore fundamental human themes like birth, death, sexuality, and transformation. His drawings challenge societal taboos, especially around eroticism and death, by rendering vulnerability and transgression not as marginal, but as fundamental to our shared humanity. Travis Jeppesen (born 1979 in Fort Lauderdale, USA) is an American novelist, poet, playwright, artist, and art critic. He is the creator of object-oriented writing, a hybrid literary-critical form, most notably in his work 16 Sculptures, featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. His books include The Suiciders, See You Again in Pyongyang, All Fall, and Victims. Noa Zuidervaart (born 1999, Netherlands) is a Dutch visual artist, illustrator, and writer whose work spans ceramics, textiles, sculpture, drawing, and installation. He explores themes of identity, death, desire, and the metaphysical through poetic, non-linear narratives rooted in myth, animism, and ecological thinking. À ngels Miralda (born 1990) is a Catalan curator and writer based in Amsterdam and Barcelona. Her curatorial practice, which she describes as a secret politics of materiality, explores how materials carry embedded meanings linked to global chains of extraction, trade, and industry. She has contributed writing to art publications while serving as editor-in-chief of Collecteurs.

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