BOBBI ESSERS

Essers paints her close-knit friendship group from candid, flashlit photographs, montaging bodies, clothing and accessories over the borders of monumental canvases to evidence the intimate realities of youthful friendships. At MuseumMORE, that practice is placed in dialogue with the Brussels-based draughtsman Robin Wen, whose hyperrealistic ballpoint drawings approach the same generational nightlife with forensic accuracy.

Essers is currently in residence at the Mack Art Foundation in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, from April to June 2026. The Foundation was set up by collector Christine Mack — Swedish-raised, Parsons-trained, formerly a graphic designer, and a board member of the Guggenheim’s Collections Council Committee, the Brooklyn Museum’s Contemporary Art Committee, and the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Global Council.

The residency programme is aimed at emerging artists who don’t live in New York and runs for up to three months; it works to introduce residents to galleries, curators and collectors, and to facilitate community projects with local organisations. Artists are housed and given studio space within the same building at 38 Huron Street: a 1,100sf ground-floor studio with floor-to-ceiling windows visible from the street (the studio doubles as a gallery), plus a studio apartment. Each resident donates one work to the Mack Art Foundation collection at the end of their stay. Bobbi’s work was already held in that collection prior to her residency.

A two-person exhibition with the Brussels-based artist Robin Wen (b. Taiwan, 1994), runs 14 May to 15 November 2026 at Museum MORE in Gorssel. The curatorial premise sets two visions of a generation’s nightlife side by side: Essers in oil on canvas, working from analogue photographs of her friends; Wen in hyperrealistic blue ballpoint pen drawings rooted in Free Party and rave culture, where his subjects appear in empty party sites at dawn or as faceless dancing figures.

The museum frames Essers’ contribution around queer positivity, deliberately ambiguous gender and identity, and the rituals of friendship and the after-hours. Works in the show include In a New York State of Mind (2025), Love Ridden (I’ve Looked at You) (2025), and Nothing Makes Me Feel As Good (2025). MuseumMORE had previously included Essers in the group shows Licked by the Waves (2024) and Reality Check (2025). Wen graduated from La Cambre in Brussels in 2018 and won the Woluwe-Saint-Pierre Arts Prize; this is his first appearance in a Dutch museum.

Curated by Dutch artist-curator Louise te Poele, the collaboration between Saatchi Gallery, the V&A, and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the UK involved ten Dutch female artists creating new works in direct response to pieces by women in the V&A’s collection.

The artists worked with the V&A’s Prints and Drawings Cabinet, in collaboration with the museum’s Paintings and Drawings Department staff Damiët Schneeweisz and Rosalind McKever, studying works by British female artists including Barbara Hepworth and Bridget Riley. The curatorial framing cites Guerrilla Girls research that less than 5% of artists in museum collections are women, while 85% of depicted nudes are female. The exhibition was opened by Dutch Ambassador Paul Huijts, with the full cohort alongside Essers: Lily de Bont, Margriet van Breevoort, Larissa Esvelt, Anya Janssen, Audrey Large, Femmy Otten, Louise te Poele, Saar Scheerlings and Bregje Slipenbeek.

Essers’ UK solo debut, The World at Our Command, at Unit in 2024 followed several institutional inclusions: In Focus at Centraal Museum, Utrecht; and Licked by the Waves at MuseumMORE, Gorssel.

Her new series extended her practice into fragmented compositions echoing surrealist photomontage — limbs, bodies, clothing and accessories taken from candid photographs of her friends, the figures monumentalised and anonymised. The title came from Essers’ own phrase “we decide our own world”, framed as a generational statement.