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Riëtte Wanders

Born in Rhenen, Netherlands, the contemporary artist Riëtte Wanders currently lives and works in Amsterdam. The pieces that Wanders creates are monumental in their size and impact. She often binds herself to a single medium followed up by her own set of rules about abstraction or lack of dimensionality. Executed in shades of blacks, whites, and greys, her rhythmic and full of movement work draws its inspiration from music.

This absence of color, that dominates the work of Riëtte Wanders, highlights other elements like texture, structure, and composition. But more than anything, Wanders’ work reveals in its material presence.

For example, in her previous drawings on paper, this manifests as the blackest black of Siberian chalk. Or sometimes as the subtle drips of watery acrylic paint on bulging paper. In fact, those combinations give her work an almost prehistorical, or at least a- historical, feel.

Expressive, unapologetic, and somewhat dirty, her pieces boldly flaunt their imperfections. Paint, applied chaotically in splashes or sometimes with a roller, appears partly hidden by a mosquito net or, for example, crossed with the ‘drawn’ by sewing machine lines. This is intuitive chemistry, as if we witness a universe in the process of self-actualization, stopped in the mid-process and recorded by the artist.

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