Art Rotterdam 2026: Helen Verhoeven & Ryan Gander

For Art Rotterdam, Annet Gelink Gallery presents a duo-booth featuring Ryan Gander and Helen Verhoeven. While their practices remain formally and conceptually distinct, the presentation brings their works into dialogue through a shared engagement with the visual legacy of art history. Both artists begin from a close analysis of canonical images, figures, and gestures drawn from iconic works and artists of the past, approaching these references not as quotations but as material to be re-examined, displaced, and reconfigured within contemporary contexts. Through painting and sculpture respectively, Verhoeven and Gander revisit historically charged motifs and archetypal figures, probing how images circulate, acquire meaning, and persist over time.

RYAN GANDER

Irretrievably broken from the past, or Low hanging fruit (2020)

Ryan Gander’s (1976, Chester, United Kingdom) work materialises in many different forms, ranging from sculpture, apparel and writing to architecture, painting, typefaces, publications and performance.  Gander’s ongoing ballerina series reimagines Edgar Degas’ La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (1880-1881), casting the figure in bronze and freeing her from her traditional pedestal. Posed modestly and realistically, and interacting with a small blue cube — a symbol of contemporary art and institutional structures — the series of 22 ballerinas, of which this work is part, explores themes of agency, curiosity, and the tension between classical tradition and contemporary practice. Through these works, Gander invites viewers to reconsider the role of the artwork, the institution, and the spectator.

In Irretrievably broken from the past, or Low hanging fruit, the ballerina gazes toward what is easily within reach — the “low hanging fruit” — a metaphor for the temptation of nostalgia and the comfort of the familiar. The title suggests how an attachment to the past, or to what comes too easily, can limit ambition and prevent bolder forms of thinking and making. At the same time, the object remains ultimately untouchable. Although it appears close, it belongs to a world the ballerina is not fully part of, reinforcing a sense of distance and quiet frustration. The work gently reflects on the constraints placed on artists and ideas, and on the difficulty of moving forward while remaining tethered to what has already been done

HELEN VERHOEVEN

The Subjects (2026)

Helen Verhoeven’s (1974, Leiden, The Netherlands) paintings concentrate on the human experience, capturing the turmoil of the individual and the hysteria of the group. At times finely rendered, at times deliberately crude, her distinctive pictorial style appropriates and inverts traditions of portraiture, religious and mythological painting, and the fantastical and the mundane. Her work depicts rapture, despair, indifference, lust, aggression, and estrangement within a transhistorical space.

On the occasion of the fair, Annet Gelink Gallery presents new works, shown here for the first time. This body of work engages with the long tradition of artists depicting themselves in relation to their models, paying particular attention to how materials that both reveal and conceal have functioned within this history. Drawing on references from early modern painting to contemporary fashion, the works reflects on shifting ideas of visibility, intimacy, and display through the evolving depiction of underwear and lingerie. 

These garments become a lens through which to consider exposure and vulnerability, as well as sexualization and objectification, connecting to broader systems of gender roles, aesthetics, beauty ideals, ability, and commercial exchange. Rather than following a single narrative, the paintings explore how repetition, reflection, and transparency create different modes of looking, positioning, and exchange — between artist and subject, painter and “muse,” private and public space, and image and viewer. By staging varying degrees of exposure and opacity within her figures, Verhoeven examines the politics of visibility: what is worn, why it is worn, and how such choices signal power relations both within and beyond the painting. Through this open investigation of figure, material, and surface, the project considers how conventions of beauty, power, and representation continue to be negotiated today.