Nothing Makes Me Feel As Good

What does freedom look like once you pin it down? In oil paintings and ballpoint drawings, Bobbi Essers (2000) and Robin Wen (1994) each show their generation's urge to break loose, from lazy evenings with friends to parties that run into the early hours. Both make still, filmic snapshots, and what they leave out says as much as what they show.

Essers paints from analogue photographs of her friends. On large canvases she crops her world into abrupt fragments, a shoulder, an earring, a lock of hair, an embrace, woven into images that feel like memories of a night long over. Identity and gender are often left open, and the work is unapologetically queer-positive.

Wen draws the world of free parties and rave culture almost entirely in blue ballpoint, with near-photographic precision: empty party sites in the morning light, dancing figures without faces. It is the first time his work has been shown in a Dutch museum.

Essers graduated from HKU in 2022, took her master's at the Frank Mohr Institute in 2024 and won the Royal Award for Modern Painting in 2023. Wen, born in Taiwan and based in Brussels, graduated from La Cambre in 2018. The exhibition is curated by Marieke Jooren and Vita Ostendorf, and is on in the museum's Tuinzaal.