Kiki Lamers

Annet Gelink Gallery is proud to present new work by the Dutch artist Kiki Lamers (1964). Ten years ago, Kiki Lamers became known for her life-sized self-portraits - austere, disciplined paintings with an atmosphere of quiescence and estrangement. Since 1995, Lamers has been concentrating on the painting of children's portraits.

Kiki Lamers shows children as they really are: seducers, comedians, attention-drawers and small adults. Lamers' paintings are based on spontaneous photographic moments. The medium of photography has become both a practical guide and a source of inspiration for the artist. There's always a certain field of tension between photography and painting in her work. Lamers appropriates the advantages of photography only to release them in the task of painting. Her smoothly painted canvases evoke an alienating, uncomfortable tension between private and public space, between the viewer and the viewed, intimacy and voyeurism.
But the paintings by Lamers being shown at the Annet Gelink Gallery also reveal a new development. In her more recent work, the artist zooms in more on details such as an ear or an eye. The taut brushstroke is replaced by a stroke that is looser and more painterly. Large canvases have made way for smaller ones, and the cool palette of wispy grey and pink tints has yielded to one that is more colourful. A new series of works is also being shown in which Lamers has begun to paint with oils on paper.

At the opening of the show, Kiki Lamers' new publication 'Tender Age' will be presented. This book, published by Artimo, contains essays by the Dutch art critic Anna Tilroe and the American curator/art historian Dan Cameron, and there the work of Lamers is located within the wider framework of art history and cultural philosophy. The reader is also granted a look into Kiki Lamers' photographic archive, which forms the basis for her paintings.