Rezi van Lankveld “Schelper”

Petzel Gallery (35 E 67th St.)

[Image: Rezi van Lankveld "Schelper" (2016) Oil on canvas, 26 x 22.8 in.]

This event has ended.

Petzel Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by Amsterdam-based artist Rezi van Lankveld. This will be the artist’s third solo exhibition at Petzel Gallery.

We mustn’t fear the sunlight on the excuse that it has for the most part only served to light up a miserable world. Under traits new and charming, the mermaids, the doors, the ghosts, the gods, the trees, all these objects of the mind will be restored to the intense life of lights, living in the isolation of the mental universe.

—Rene Magritte, “Continuous Experience”, from Surrealism in Broad Daylight, 1946.

Rezi van Lankveld’s new paintings are transformations of abstract subject and composition. Like her previous works, hints of the visible world emerge from the fluidity of the painted image. However, unlike her earlier duel-toned oil paintings, the new canvases assign a greater role to color. Van Lankveld uses a spectrum of tints, hues and tones to convey a way of seeing that encompasses different aspects of vision. In the paintings, color takes on the physicality of rhythmic form and spatial depth while it simultaneously plays a psychological role that relates to time, movement, sensuality and memory. The paintings appeal to an existential mood as they tangentially align with images of the world that surround us.

The size of the canvases invites an intimacy and immediacy to a reading of these works; situating the viewer between his/her own physical space and an imagined world presented through the image. Painted planes and plateaus emerge as mythical landscapes, organic figurations and improvised narratives. Yet these images are fragile as van Lankveld employs various degrees of viscous brushed and pooled textures to break any concrete illusion. In other paintings, shapes are anthropomorphized, conveying a sense of having gained a life, just as schelp (Dutch for “shell”) becomes personified by van Landveld’s neologism, schelper.

Rezi van Lankveld lives and works in Amsterdam. She graduated from Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht in 1999. She has shown extensively throughout Europe. Her recent exhibitions include: at Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato (2013), Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2009), Museum van Loon, Amsterdam (2006/2007), GEM Museum Voor Actuele Kunst, Den Haag (2006/2007), Museum Kunst palast, Dusseldorf (2005), Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2008), Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (2001), Hedah, Maastrischt (2000). Her work is in the collection of: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam; The Rabobank Art Collection, Utrecht; The Art Collection of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago; Zabludowicz Collection, London and New York among others.