Exhibitions

Opening: Saturday 18 April

Roger Katwijk is pleased to announce its second solo exhibition by Dutch artist Coen Vunderink.

With Thin Places, Roger Katwijk presents a new series of paintings by  Coen Vunderink in which landscape, painting, and perception become intertwined. The works move within a space where visibility and withdrawal, presence and projection, matter and suggestion continuously exchange places.

The title refers to the Celtic notion of “thin places”: places where the boundary between the earthly and the unseen seems to become thin. In this exhibition, Vunderink explores that idea through landscape motifs such as trees, branches, water, and sky, which not only refer to the visible world, but also function as carriers of memory, projection, and inner space. The paintings are built up from open, thinly painted layers of oil, interspersed with more impasto-like accents. In some works, Vunderink paints over older abstract canvases, allowing earlier images and edges to remain visible as active underlayers. In this way, the paintings become sites in which different temporal layers and realities are simultaneously present.

Within Thin Places, themes recur that have long been present in Vunderink’s work: the painting as window, filter, and threshold space; the tension between figuration and abstraction; and the question of how an image can make something palpable that cannot be fully fixed.

The exhibition shows how painting can become a place where looking slows down and meaning remains open.