Kiki Lamers

Annet Gelink Gallery is proud to present its second solo exhibition of Dutch artist Kiki Lamers (1964).

Kiki Lamers first became known in the early 90's for her sober life-size self-portraits. In the mid 90's she focused on painting children, capturing the unique expression of a spontaneous moment.

Kiki Lamers' oil paintings show a sublime technical mastery. Kiki Lamers has been perfecting a technique, which she has been employing during the past decennia. When photographing Kiki Lamers often uses photographer's lights to set light on her subjects' faces. This is a very bold, merciless approach for the sitter. The artist is moving in very close on her subject. While the small children at play, which Kiki Lamers painted showed little self-awareness in front of a camera, the more grown up subjects in Lamers recent portraits react visibly to the intrusion of the camera. The teenage girl looks back at us with a drawn-up gaze, the aging woman on another canvas answers the camera with a cool held up head, looking down at us as heroically and yet defensively. In these monumental canvases Kiki Lamers manages to capture what Anna Tilroe once called the "uneasiness we feel about having a body".

In her new works Kiki Lamers the drama always present but hidden in her past works comes out with an overwhelming intensity. The wispy grey and pink tints of her former paintings have blended into a deep multilayered anthracite tone. The portraits of a young girl and a small boy have a new sinister soberness. They correspond with the sense of transience apparent in the close-up portraits of fading flowers and branches - a new subject in the artist's oeuvre. And yet they are a subsequent pursue of what the artist has been concentrating on since the beginning of her career: to portrait the aura of a subject.