Finitude

Gallery van Fanny Freytag is honoured to announce the first solo exhibition in a gallery by artist Elise van Staveren, presented during Amsterdam Art Week.

Elise van Staveren is a painter who incorporates other materials into her practice. In this solo exhibition, Van Staveren takes a further step in her painterly and three-dimensional work by combining paintings, new silver objects, and cement sculptures. At the centre of her work is the tension between stillness and change. Where paint captures a moment, silver makes the passage of time visible through oxidation. The paradox of wanting to hold on to a moment or memory, and the necessity of letting it go, forms an important point of departure in her work.

Her interest in how materials can act as carriers of time became more personal when she lost her mother last year. Her death led Van Staveren to explore transience, absence and memory as central subjects within her practice. She does not depict loss literally, but instead uses materials, objects and images that refer to that which slowly disappears or changes. She explores the balance between intimacy and distance, presence and absence.

The starting point for a new series of paintings is the image of covering an object with a white cloth. In this new series, Van Staveren paints a range of everyday objects, from cars to table still lifes, that have been covered. Through this simple act of covering, she examines how an object can be made both visible and inaccessible, and how absence can become palpable precisely through concealment.