Jan Maarten Voskuil solo exhibition at Pentimenti Gallery

Sat, Oct 23 - Sat, Jan 8  2022

Pentimenti Gallery welcomes the holiday season with a solo exhibition by Jan Maarten Voskuil, titled Around the Void. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at Pentimenti Gallery, and will be on view from October 23, 2021 until January 8, 2022.

Jan Maarten Voskuil expertly calculates and constructs mathematically precise canvas stretchers, over which canvas curves and dances in seemingly impossible paraboloids. The painted surfaces of the forms are as luxurious as they are minimal.

In this new body of work, Voskuil opens up “voids” throughout the canvas for the first time. The junctures at which canvas once slotted together now pull apart and allow the medium of space to create forms within the paintings. The work pulls away from itself and reaches towards an airy but violent lightness.

Several works are painted in a subtle array of off-white tones, relating to the walls they allow to peep through, and entering a dialogue with the space all around them. The monochromatic paintings in red and blue contrast sharply with these pieces, and seem to reject the space they inhabit and that which is forced into them through the voids.

Voskuil’s paintings not only speak in the languages of movement and color, but joke, dance, and make mischief in these visual lexicons. The wry humor imbued in the work juxtaposes its formal precision and structural elegance, just as sharply as the impossibly fluid contortions of canvas defy every expectation of the material. The smoothness of the surface, combined with the dramatic movement of the stretched canvas beneath, obscures the material so fully as to generate an entirely novel materiality. It is an active challenge to read these works as paint on canvas, and perhaps “activity” is the operative feature of the works, as they activate the viewer’s senses of space and possibility.

Jan Maarten Voskuil (b. 1964, Arnhem, Netherlands) received his MA from State University Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands, and completed post-graduate study at Art Academy Arnhem, Arnhem, Netherlands. His recent exhibitions include The Mondriaan House Museum, Amersfoort, Netherlands; Gorcums Museum, Netherlands; Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Netherlands; and many other museums and institutions. His work is in the collections of Frans Hals Museum, Netherlands; Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Netherlands; Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Germany; Museum of Geometric & MADI Art, Dallas, TX; Collection Sanquin, Amsterdam; CCNOA, Belgium; Museum Voorlinden, Netherlands; as well as many private and corporate collections. Jan Maarten Voskuil is represented by Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia, PA.

For all inquiries, please contact Pentimenti Gallery at mail@pentimenti.com or +1 215.625.9990.