MIKO VELDKAMP

Veldkamp’s work melds his Surinamese, Dutch, and New York past and present experiences together, drawing on elements both private and public, from art history, family photo albums, folklore, landscape, and nature. His dreamy, mesmerising canvases depict psychological spaces imbued with colonial histories and conflicting yet intertwined cultural narratives exploring shifting notions of personal authenticity at the intersection of the North-South and East-West cultural axes.

In the present show, Veldkamp continues to delve into these subjects while exploring new patterns in his visual vocabulary, abstract and figurative as well as structural and textural. In these recent works, a translucent palette suffused with light, contrasted with darker tones achieved through thinly layered brushstrokes, gives expression to a rich expanse of dreams and reality, the interior self and the external world. The artist himself and members of his family often inhabit these scenes. The recurring figure on a bicycle is also another version of Veldkamp, tracing a fluid trajectory through present reality and a past recalled or imagined. Suspended in some liminal space, the figures in his work appear as both specific memories and surreal specters. Light and shadows, reflection and fragmentation, patterns both geometric and organic all combine to shuffle linear concepts of time and space, producing another kind of order and rhythm on the canvas.

The artist has spoken of his method as a kind of dive into memory and trauma. Deploying a candid, intimate visual language that conveys a sense of melancholy both deeply personal and distinctly contemporary, he has captured how collective memories permeate societies and cultures and how identity is performed and community is maintained within them.