Art Rotterdam

Rotterdam Ahoy | Booth F01

VIP Preview: Thursday, 27 March

 28 - 30 March 2025

GRIMM is pleased to present a group exhibition for Art Rotterdam 2025 featuring Charles Avery, Tjebbe Beekman, Gabriella Boyd, Dirk Braeckman, Anders Davidsen, Louise Giovanelli, Angela Heisch, Volker Hüller, Saskia Noor van Imhoff, Claudia Martínez Garay, Dave McDermott, Ciarán Murphy, Michael Raedecker, Alex van Warmerdam, Jonathan Wateridge and Matthias Weischer.

Over the course of his career, Charles Avery has dedicated himself to a singular world-building project through the depiction of an imaginary island. Titled The Islanders, this project describes the formation of Avery's extensive fiction through drawings, writing, objects, architecture, and design. The Island at the center of Avery's constructed world is located on an archipelago. The gateway to the Island is the town of Onomatopoeia, a highly-textured metropolis that bears the hallmarks of an evolving urban landscape. Once the stepping off point for the pioneers who first came, the town experienced rapid transformation from a colonial outpost, to a boom town, bustling metropolis, depression-ravaged slum, and finally a regenerated city of culture and tourist destination. The culture and fabric of the Island continue to evolve, further illuminated with each successive work.

The work by Avery presented at Art Rotterdam is related to a new comissioned sculpture, Henge #2, which will be unveiled to the public on July 28, 2025, at the sculpture park Vliedduinen in Domburg (NL). 

Avery recently had a solo exhibition, The Eidola, Pigs and Blades of the Inner Vast at GRIMM, New York (US). In addition, Avery’s works are featured in A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now, curated by Tom Morton, Green Family Foundation, Dallas, TX (US), on view until May 11, 2025.

Tjebbe Beekman’s canvases are simultaneously abstract and expressive, disorienting the viewer’s sense of space. Layering increasingly fragmented and polarised images, Beekman’s work is a personal reflection of contemporary society and his method of adapting to the existential events of today through creating a dialogue with his contemporaries of the past. 

Beekman’s work embraces and pays tribute to a breadth of influences from Pablo Picasso to Piet Mondriaan - balancing composition, color and perspective through the lens of art history while incorporating the nuance of socially and environmentally engaged contemporary work into his narrative. Beekman’s voracious palette of influences and ideas evokes the endless stream of media and information we sift through daily.

Beekman recently held a solo exhibition at GRIMM in Amsterdam (NL) titled Glitch. 

For Gabriella Boyd the act of painting is an act of translation, from the interior or verbal, into the exterior and visual. As psychological and literal spaces collide, Boyd explores and collapses the distinction between interior and exterior states by bringing together representational motifs with purely symbolic structures or diagrammatic forms. In an attempt to depict embodied experience and memory, painting enables the approximation of sentiment or language, allowing invisible sources of power and energy to flourish in indefinite but sincere, candid vocabularies. Boyd explores the power relations between people and their environments, focusing on the charging and depletion of resources experienced in daily urban life. Merging a vibrant colour palette, she creates a refracted appearance through often hazy, geometric interiors, evoking the doubling effect of windows or mirrors.

In 2024 the artist had her first institutional solo exhibition Presser at Cample Line in Dumfriesshire, Scotland (UK), and completed the residency program with The Roberts Institute of Art in Scotland (UK) from October to November 2024. Boyd is included in the group exhibition From Observation to Abstraction: The Body in Art at The Royal Academy of Arts on view untill June 30, 2025. In addition, she will have a solo exhibition at GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL) in the fall of 2025.

Since the mid-1980s, Dirk Braeckman has developed an impressive oeuvre consisting of photography, and more recently video. Encountering images from his daily surroundings and by chance, Braeckman’s works sugges trather than explain. They offer a window into an unidentified reality: distant seascapes, deserted ballrooms, billowing curtains, antique wallpaper, or the blurred image of a nude. Atmosphere, cropping, light and texture are given central place in Braeckman’s poetic work.

Braeckman’s darkroom functions like a painter’s studio; an area for experimentation where the artist allows freedom, spontaneity and time to influence his creative process. Using tools and techniques to manipulate the negatives, the resulting works possess a tactility rarely seen in photography. Braeckman’s painterly approach stretches the limits of the medium. According to Braeckman, photography is the most subjective experience there is. Far from telling the truth, the medium offers a boundless illusion.

The works that are presented at Art Rotterdam are works that Braeckman created for his recent solo exhibition, Echtzeit at FOMU, Antwerp (BE). 

Anders Davidsen’s distinctive paintings trace the passage of time using seascapes as a foundation from which he explores the effects of atmosphere and light. Images emerge from a setting sun or rising moon resting on the horizon, their rays radiating outwardly in gentle rhythms. Davidsen fuses inner and outer worlds, working from memories of his childhood spent fishing and swimming in the fjords of northern Denmark. 

Recalling the shifting patterns of light across the water’s surface, he recreates the natural subtle ties of these moments in each canvas. Davidsen’s studio is filled with varying-sized seascapes, each an experiment into the endless amalgamations of light, air, and water. Completing his paintings sequentially, he mines his memory to recreate these quiet moments of contemplation as sunlight sparkles across the sea.

In November 2025, GRIMM New York, NY (US) will present a solo exhibition of Anders Davidsen's work.

Louise Giovanelli’s delicate, luminous works inject vitality into historical subjects from the canon of Western art. Through interconnected series, she weaves together visual clues surrounding a specific moment or event. Her subject matter is primarily chosen for its formal qualities and includes staged photographs, film stills, and architectural elements.

Within each series, Giovanelli repeats her motifs, deftly manipulating light and form, her multivalent imagery reminds us that the classical foundations of painting remain sources of delight and innovation.

These four new etchings are each technically complex, combining a variety of techniques. Three of the etchings have hand-painted additions, which makes each impression different and unique. Based on film stills used for recent small paintings, the etchings are new variations on each theme. 

Giovanelli currently has a major solo exhibition Louise Giovanelli: A Song of Ascents at the Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire (UK) until April 21, 2025, which will also travel to HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark in Graz (AT). From May 9 until June 21, 2025, Louise Giovanelli will have solo exhibition of new paintings at GRIMM, New York, NY (US).

Known for her luminous application of color, Angela Heisch composes paintings of repeated motifs, curving forms, and delicate, gestural lines. Drawing inspiration from organic bodies, patterns in nature, and the cosmos, Heisch’s paintings are infused with waves of energy and tension, capturing triumphant yet fleeting moments of balance and stillness. Heisch paints carefully in multi-layered applications of oil on canvas to achieve the desired atmospheric qualities and emotional tenor of the final work.

Each painting is characterized by a sense of movement, a fluidity reflected in the opposing properties that coexist on the canvas–hard and soft, light and dark, flatness and depth. Such oppositional symmetry is at the heart of the artist’s practice and infuses her paintings with an embodied inquisitive gaze, directly inviting the viewer to engage and explore open-ended states of possibility and meaning.

Heisch currently has a solo exhibition at GRIMM in Amsterdam (NL) titled Chambers, on view until May 10, 2025.

Volker Hüller’s fragmented compositions speak to the mental spaces between dreams, delirium, and daily life. Figures are woven into the environment of the background creating an interplay between Hüller’s subjects and the features of the worlds they inhabit. Hüller integrates a succession of historical styles, but his works most distinctly possesses affinities to Expressionism, Cubism, and other strands of modernist exploration.

The artist pays careful attention to the balance between color, textural detail and unrestrained figuration, experimenting with different media to pin down a particular mood or essence. Hüller’s work surveys ways of depicting the artist, positioned in a mystical dystopia, forming part of heterogeneous narratives that link the fantastical to the mundane. Delicate lines score his compositions, creating an unsteady balance between chaos and harmony, highlighting a shared sense of vulnerability.

Saskia Noor van Imhoff examines systems, hierarchical structures, and ideas about collecting in her work. In recent years, she has expanded her focus beyond from institutional frameworks to the land, acquiring a plot of rural farmland on the northern coast of the Netherlands.

Transplanting her studio practice to this former dairy farm in the Dutch countryside, Van Imhoff’s research has been drawn to the idea of the land as a repository of knowledge, an expression of its own history, and a resource to learn more about ourselves. The process of documenting and rehabilitating the site forms the basis of her work, creating installations that echo the space outside of their original environment - the resulting photographs and sculptural installations examining systems of perception, archiving and archaeology. While addressing ideas of stewardship and our responsibility to and reliance on the land, she also questions the idea of a collection as a knowledge system and a mechanism that selects, differentiates, and classifies.

The works presented at Art Rotterdam are related to Van Imhoff's new installation, currently on view in the group exhibition Cosmos at the Teylers Museum in Haarlem (NL) until June 29, 2025. She selected objects from the museum's collection that, for various reasons, are seldom exposed to light. These include a series of moon photographs on delicate paper, uranium-containing stones emitting harmful radiation, the first X-ray images, and a pallasite meteorite, as old as the sun.

GRIMM will also present Van Imhoff’s work at Dallas Invitational, TX (US) on view from April 10 to 12, 2025, together with works by Michael Raedecker.

Claudia Martínez Garay’s practice encompasses painting, sculpture, printmaking, video, and site-specific installation. Her sculptural works most often reference pre-Columbian aesthetics, particularly artefacts from the Incan civilisation. These sculptures are combined in larger installations in dialogue with symbolic elements derived from her research.

In the work presented at Art Rotterdam, La Nueva Cosecha / The New Harvest, Claudia Martínez Garay continues to push the boundaries of her “clay painting” which she achieves by mixing clay and acrylic paint to allude visually and conceptually to Peruvian soil and grounds. Centering the composition, Martínez Garay renders a hunting face from an ancient ceramic vase, housed in a European museum. She recreates the face as a close-up portrait, as though summoning an ancestral apparition.

A new installation by Martínez Garay will be presented at Art Basel in the Unlimited sector from June 19 to 22, 2025, in Basel (CH). Martínez Garay recently had a solo exhibition titled Borrowed Air at GRIMM, London (UK). As well as her critically acclaimed solo exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary and Dundee Contemporary Arts.

Dave McDermott’s work surveys the tropes we have inherited throughout our collective history, and translates them into an expansive language of his own making. There are echoes of both Classicism and Dada in McDermott’s work, an assertion that there is ultimately no hierarchical difference between the sublime and the absurd.

His paintings are steeped in historical (and art-historical) references, personal histories, literary, cinematic, and cultural references (both high and low), but they eschew didactic or moral positions. Instead McDermott recasts his subjects as stand-ins for ourselves, through which we may gaze into the reflection of our individual and shared consciousness. The interaction of incongruous materials on the canvas is paramount to his work.

Fragmented perspectives—obscured by fluctuating vantagepoints, and jigsaw-like arrangements—shift and roil on the canvas. Gold leaf, plaster, and expressive brushwork create differentiation between themes, and this commingling of materials imparts the unbound characters and forms with a sense of individual elegance. 

Ciarán Murphy’s paintings engage with the entanglement of technological and analogue modes of image-making. Negotiating an infinity of found images, Murphy splices together source materials, allowing for chance encounters and incongruity to collapse seemingly distinct subject matter into resolved compositions. In doing so, he examines and disrupts the dichotomy between original and copy, in favour of painting a blend or ‘mutation,’ asserting the painted medium’s ability to capture an atmosphere or sensation through approximation rather than through mechanical reproduction.

Beginning each painting with a process of cutting and collaging different symbols and motifs across the canvas, Murphy allows competing foregrounds and backgrounds to merge unexpectedly. In this way, each painting is realised through the union of visual elements that might be jarring and harmonious inequal measure. Once a desired subject reveals itself, Murphy sets about rendering it in oils, often utilising a range of techniques, from areas of impasto and passages of scumbling, to the scraping and sweeping of paint from the surface, dissolving the absolute clarity of the subject and allowing the image to fade away from easy perception. Murphy’s paintings therefore engage with sight itself, asking what the human eye can distinguish that a camera lens or computer screen, for instance, might not. 

Michael Raedecker’s work seeks to make sense of the symbiotic and often parasitic relationship between nature and humanity – to understand our place in the world and draw attention to the proximity and power of nature in relation to the urban environment.

His distinctive practice blends painting with richly textural embroidery, conjuring scenes that hold the urban in an uneasy balance with nature which creepsand sprawls across the canvas. In both its content and form, Raedecker’s work engages with the act of deconstruction and reconfiguration, resisting the perceived distinctions between ‘fine art’ and craft, and drawing attention to competing surface qualities and the illusion of representation as he subverts the painted canvas with textured details.

Raedecker’s works are currently visible in the exhibtion A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now, curated by Tom Morton at The Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (US). In addition, GRIMM will present his work at Dallas Invitational, 10-12 April, 2025, Dallas, TX (US).  

Dutch artist, filmmaker, actor, and writer Alex van Warmerdam has a diverse practice; working across multiple mediums he has established a distinctive voice as one of the Netherland’s most renowned filmmakers. Van Warmerdam explores the absurdity, humor, and horror of social conventions and personality types, proposing that devolvement into the surreal is an ever-present possibility. Van Warmerdam's paintings are constructed like dream sequences, preparing the viewer for the ensuing moments of an unfolding narrative.

The practice of embedding themes from Dutch intellectual and cultural history is manifest in van Warmerdam’s series Tronies. This body of work references the Dutch Golden Age genre, depicting anonymous individuals, accentuating their features to relay aspects of their personality, state of mind, and character.

His latest paintings, part of the series Verschijningen (Apparitions), are based on a multitude of images, photographs and clippings that Van Warmerdamhas collected throughout the years and which he subsequently combines. Colour combinations create captivating images that intrigue the viewer with their powerful presence and offer alternative ways of perceiving the ordinary. 

Jonathan Wateridge is best known for his paintings that depict spectral, isolated men and women who blend in and out of their poolside environments. Recently, he has developed a formal language to more deeply explore figures that often seem isolated, interrupted, or unsure of themselves - figures, inother words, who occupy a world that is no longer guaranteed or available to them. 

The formal and expressive aspects of Wateridge’s style have come to the fore in recent years, as he pushes the tension between realist elements and a sense of the cinematic with the visual grammars of modernism. Each painting is heavily worked, sometimes taking many months to complete, and such changes are becoming increasingly visible on the surface of the canvases. This more fluid and expressive process has now superseded his previous affinity for building sets and hiring models; the staged theater of his earlier work is now contained in the very making of the paintings themselves. 

The artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery titled Vanishing Point is currently on view at GRIMM, London (UK) untill April 5, 2025. A new publication with an essay by Lydia Figes will be published to accompany the exhibition. Click here to pre-order. 

Throughout his career, Matthias Weischer has explored the illusory potential of pictorial space through multiple perspectives. He uses the domestic realm as a framework to enhance the viewer’s experience of the interior as a stage for symbolic objects, while his thick application of paint speaks to a practice rich with conceptual and material exploration.

In his new work, Weischer constructs enigmatic interior scenes that suggest a fleeting human presence. Each room captures an in-between moment; the rooms themselves appear almost in disrepair, as sparsely placed furniture suggests a state of abandonment. The spaces become increasingly uncanny due to the artist’s depiction of paintings within many of the scenes, creating a disorienting layering of dimensions.

In 2004, Weischer was chosen as the protégé of the British artist David Hockney through the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Initiative. In 2005 Weischer participated in the Prague Biennial 2 (CZ) and the 51st Venice Biennial (IT). Weischer is currently part of the group show 10 Years G2 Kunsthalle in Leipzig (DE) to mark their tenth anniversary.

GRIMM is pleased to announce that Arturo Kameya will be part of the Projections booth at Art Rotterdam 2025 with his video installation Punto ciego / Blindspot. 

Arturo Kameya’s work examines the narratives and myths that comprise different versions of history, with a distinct focus on indigenous cultures. Kameya works with various mediums, including acrylic, plaster, film, and print making. His multimedia artworks are often arranged together to create large-scale installations that delineate connections between disparate historical events, by linking together a range of visual cultural languages which have been formed over time. Recent works closely examine the fabric of urban environments, while embracing the contradictions that come with knowing a place intimately. His work is noted for its attentive and direct critical depictions of his native country Peru, that narrate both the troubling and familiar aspects of life there.

Punto ciego / Blindspot composed from excerpts from Peruvian films from the 70s, 80s and 90s; decades in which the country was immersed in a civil war between state forces and terrorist guerrillas. These movies depicted the age of violence and poverty that afflicts the political, social and cultural platforms of the country. The idea of this work is to create a non-verbal narrative from the fragments of the following films: Alias La Gringa (1991), dir: Alberto ‘Chicho’ Durant; The Green Wall (1969) and Mirage (1972), dir: Armando Robles Godoy; The city and the dogs (1985), dir: Francisco Lombardi; Kukulí (1961) and Hungry dogs (1977), dir: Luis Figueroa; Gregorio (1985), Miss Universo en el Perú (1982), Cucharita (1982), Crisanto el haitiano (1989) and Margot from the circus (1987), dir: Grupo Chaski.

Click here to watch the video. Password: AK2015BlindDot

For enquiries regarding the featured works or for more information, please

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