Private View: Saturday, 7th December 2024, 6-9pm AND Sunday, 8th December 2024, 11-2pm West Palm Beach (Florida, USA)
For her 2nd solo exhibition with Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in Palm Beach, Lotte Keijzer created a new body of work revolving around the blend of architecture, painting, illustration, and craft. Looking at ordinary stairways, a set of steps leading from one level of a building to another, the Dutch painter takes us to various emotive, imaginary, and theoretical places.
Following the London 2023 solo exhibition Chloro Galore, in which Keijzer delved into her carefree childhood memories by portraying lonely poolside scenes, her US debut introduces stairs as a leading protagonist of the work. Sparked by her interest in architecture and its infinite potential as a painterly motif, the initially simple idea evolved into an elaborate concept in which everyday sights transcend the ordinariness of life. The functional and aesthetic structural elements are converted into poetic allegories of various personal experiences, thoughts, concerns, or beliefs using a distinct process. Enabling the exploration of perspectives, depth, light, and dimensionality but also playing with surfaces, textures, and materiality, the new paintings are a continuation of Keijzer’s peculiar way of looking at the world and reshaping those views into unassuming yet cryptic, desolate tableaus.
Growing up in The Netherlands, the stairs are an everyday part of the home life and are often connected with personal memories. Used to separate aspects of life (public and private), as an occasional place for play, a communication channel between the household members, or having a part in an incident resulting in injury or even death, their ubiquity is a significant part of their mystique. By stepping away from the bubblegum, eye candy palette and employing still vibrant and bold but slightly dimmed and subdued tones, Keijzer emphasized this sense of mystery and intrigue. Their strict rhythm and critical dependence on rules of perspective and dimensionality made them particularly interesting to mess with and transform into patterns through painterly language. Looking further at one of the most integral architectural concepts, the ideas of connectivity, elevation (or the descent), navigation, limitation, their intermediary nature, and the ability to cross between spaces made stairs an infinite source of inspiration. Thinking of how different stairways convey different ambiance, Keijzer’s emotive response to the particular space prompted the development of the respective image. Whether nodding at the unceasing cycle of household chores (Does it Ever End, Order of Things, both 2024), life interactions and dynamics (Breadcrumbing, 2024), or touching heavier topics of class segregation (Estate of Distance, 2024), housing and social privilege (Structural Fortune, 2024), all the way to bring up genetics and self-formation (The Unavoidable Helix, 2024), Keijzer places the viewer at the bottom of the stairs and promises, I’ll Take You There.
- Saša Bogojev
