There are seventy art spaces and over a hundred events listed as part of Amsterdam’s Art Week (20-25 May), including the open studios, which I have chosen below. Most of the shows carry on for several weeks, and it is, of course, a very pleasant city. I recommend a visit soon, or this time next year… Here are eight works from just-opened exhibitions that give a feel for the quality and diversity on offer.
The gallery describes Guillaume Bijl (the Dutch pronounce that Gee-Yum Bye) as an anthropologist who operates in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Paris and New York rather than investigating exotic cultures. He has made realistic installations that take on an uncanny aura from being fake – a casino and a parliamentary chamber, for example. But his ‘Sorry’ series, ongoing since 1987, combines found objects to absurdly theatrical effect: Bijl’s title was a way of apologising for them not being realistic. Yet it also keys us in to the sorrowful aspect of a consumer society that surrounds us, largely without us noticing, with items that seem to come with their inauthenticity built in. That’s offset by the fact that the ‘Recent Sorry’s’ are surprising, formally inventive, and fun.
The Stedelijk opened a 100-work solo retrospective of the Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz during the Art Week. The central coup de theatre was to fill a mirrored room with a softly rippling pool of synthetic pink liquid in a mirrored room. The whole show implies the body without depicting it, including through her well-known series of water bottles filled with flesh-toned silicone – and the pool uses the standard blush flesh colour. According to the label ‘here ‘the human’ is fluid, malleable, and can be sold as products: engineered, desirable, and eerily detached’. And you couldn’t be quite sure if the liquid was responding to a soundtrack of bubbling, or was itself the cause of the sound…
Fons Welters, one of the leading Amsterdam gallerists, is closing his space after 40 years – not unreasonably, given that he’s 82. Succession plans are unclear. The last show, ‘1985-2005’, emphasises the potential loss by presenting mostly-new work by a dozen of his current roster of 21 artists. That includes, to mention five favourites, Folkert de Jong, Femmy Otten, Magali Reus, Maria Roosen and Berend Strik… Here’s a lime wood and human hair sculpture by Otten, wittily conjoining surreal, religious, hippy, colonial and sexual registers.
Video artist, somatic practitioner and sex coach Melanie Bonajo’s show ‘Thinking through Touch’ features four immersively installed films. The latest is ‘School of Lovers’, a collaboration with people with cognitive disabilities. It winningly and humorously recognises difference without seeing it as the limitation often assumed in the area of intimacy, all while making the point that society isn’t so far advanced. In the gallery’s words ‘it questions who gets access to knowledge, whose desires are legitimized, and how we learn about bodies, gender, and boundaries when systems fail us.’
The ninth edition of Amsterdam’s Sculpture Biennale, ‘ArtZuid’, has just opened, placing 80 monumental works in the grassy central strips where water might have been expected in several contiguous streets around the south of the city. The judicious mix of Dutch and international artists includes this home entry. I like the monumental simplicity of Rob Schreefel’s inversion of a doubled motif. They could be two rather comical figures – stick men in a way, yet the opposite – one standing in their head. At four metres high, they would be giants, though not so outsized as if they were an exclamation mark and a letter ‘i’, with a granite boulder forming an exceptionally heavy dot. I start to see why writing was somewhat limited in the Stone Age.
Helen Verhoeven grew up in Amsterdam before moving (like her film director father, Paul) to the US in the 1980s. She is now based in Berlin and has recently switched her Amsterdam representation from Stigter Van Doesberg to Annet Gelink. The gallery says her work deals with ‘the turmoil of the individual and the hysteria of the group’. The title of her new series, ‘Because’, could be ‘a declaration of autonomy and artistic freedom. At the same time, it gestures toward a question, an unspoken why.’ That makes space for doubt and multiplicity, reinforced by Verhoeven’s method of covering her figures’ faces as she works, and deciding how to handle them as a late step, here to a mask-like effect.
Marleen Sleeuwits is known for calling attention to spaces so ordinary they are hardly noticed. In each work in her ‘Ongoing Series of False Ceilings’ she splices together a photograph, a cast, and a replica of plain – because unencumbered – suspended ceilings: she spends a lot of time looking up. These are housed in Plexiglas cases, rather as if our most mundane structures might one day be displayed as relics in a museum. Shown on the wall, rather than the ceiling, they then operate attractively as geometric sculptures-come-multi-sided-paintings: bland anonymity may be a malign influence, but it proves to have hidden possibilities.
After years of travelling, Aldo van den Broek has settled on a farm outside Amsterdam, responding to the news rather than to new places. The key note of his show at Gallery Vriend van Bavink’s impressive new space is a reimagining of Arnold Boecklin’s ‘Isle of the Dead’ – in the context of it being Hitler’s favourite picture, and van den Broek’s fear that the world is set on repeat mode. The other paintings respond: I took ‘The Spectator’ to be a critique of those who observe but fail to act. It has a dark materiality: van den Broek works on ramshackle combinations of wooden off-cuts and cardboard, equating this with ‘showing your scars’ rather than trying to ignore problems; and he works in the garden, embracing the contributions of rain, wind, and soil that get in the paint.
Amsterdam Art Week 2025: The Studios – Paul Carey-Kent
Many talented artists emerge from, or further develop their skills at, the studio residencies of the Rijksakademie and De Ateliers. Both opened up for the annual Amsterdam Art Week (20-25 May this year). The Rijksakademie offers fully supported two-year residencies to international and local artists. The 50 studios, occupied by a mixture of the 2023-25 and 2024-26 cohorts, were open, with each artist showcasing their recent productions. De Ateliers similarly offers two-year residencies with coaching to twenty-odd artists annually, but the public event is somewhat different: ten are selected for a curated museum-style show across all of the studios, which are cleared for the purpose. Here is something from 5 of the 50 at the Rijks and 2 of the 10 at De Ateliers.
Ashfika Rahman: ‘Than Para – No Land Without Us’, 2025, at the Rijksakademie
Bangladeshi artist Ashfika Rahman describes this as ‘a thousand temple bells hanging in silent defiance… for all displaced peoples whose lands are treated as property, not memory’. The personal aspect of that can be traced to Than Para, an indigenous village in the hills where the borders of Bangladesh, India and Myanmar converge. Community roots run deep, yet state-backed forces are seizing ancestral land to make way for tourism and industry, ‘raising urgent questions of legal ownership and even the right to exist’. Each bell bears the fingerprint of one of the villagers whose way of life is so threatened – an accompanying stack of photographs shows each in turn making their mark. They call upon Than, both the god of the land and the Chakra word for ‘land’ itself, to witness what is being lost
Ada Maricia Patterson: ‘Does she look intemperate and unchaste?’ 2025 at the Rijksakademie
Ada Patterson ranges wide – between Barbados and Europe, and working – says her London gallery, Copperfield – ‘with masquerade, music, performance, poetry, textiles and video, feeling out the connections between storytelling, transformation, crisis, grief, rage, disappearance, discretion, self-defence and survival’. She credits the Rijks for ‘turning me into a painter’ – here, on silk, for the latest in works following ‘this strange headless woman character brandishing a hammer… She is a woman made voiceless, a woman made illegible and illegitimate; a woman who practised non-disclosure and was punished and ruined for it… She is also a woman who uses fire to make herself heard.’
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Nestor Siré: ‘PC Gamer (GOMA)’, 2024, at the Rijksakademie
Cuban artist Nestor Siré investigates ‘how technological infrastructures shape everyday life’. His ‘PC Gamer’ series takes off from gamer communities that engage in ‘modding’: the alteration of obsolete hardware to run contemporary software. Siré sees that as a metaphor for broader strategies that transcend imposed limits, for how – in the words of his accompanying publication – ‘everyday ingenuity dismantles hegonomic narratives’. He regards the resulting ‘poetics of the precarious’ as extensions of the players’ identities. His own creative interventions, made in the same spirit, turn out to be sculpturally persuasive mergers of tradition, such as ceramics, and innovation. In ‘GOMA’, a car tyre, omnipresent in Cuba’s landscape of reuse and known as a makeshift raft for purposes of migration to the United States, becomes the chassis of a gaming computer.
You can, incidentally, see more about the intersection of art and gaming in my article on Janne Schimmel for Seisma Magazine.
Jessica Wilson: ‘Sweet Nothing’, 2025, at the Rijksakademie
The most striking installation in the Rijks saw Jessica Wilson summon her native New York rather than her place of residence. She sourced a dozen of the taxi tops on which the city’s iconic yellow cabs carry advertising, but repurposed them through a CGI loop to show steam coming up from the subway. Above and below were connected in a move I took to be a Dantesque musing on our journeys through life. Artists at the Rijks also wrote for a show publication called – reasonably enough – ‘Words’. Wilson listed questions, such as ‘What is a stake in your work that keeps you up at night?’ and ‘Are we supposed to be alarmed, or in love?’
Eniwaye Oluwaseyi: ‘Vestiges of the unsaid’, 2025, at the Rijksakademie
Not many of the residents in either set of studios default to oil on canvas. Yet, Eniwaye Oluwaseyi, citing Kerry James Marshall as an inspiration, paints people from African communities in vibrant settings, seeking to evoke ‘the newly imagined and yet unreal psychological spaces within which black bodies thrive or rebel’. Self-portraits have come to the fore recently: Oluwaseyi says, ‘they hold pieces of me, my family, the books I’ve read, and the thoughts that have sat quietly in me. I move through Nigeria and the Netherlands differentl,y and these paintings live in that space — not here, not there, just in between.’ I liked the implication that the darts in the table might land in favourite books as readily as a dartboard or, come to that, in the formal echo of a spider’s web.
Lizzie Deacon: ‘Chick Magnet’, 2025, at De Ateliers
There is a moment at De Ateliers when you glimpse this couple making out in a darkened room you cannot reach. Is it a live performance, which wouldn’t be such a surprise? Or even a couple who have nothing to do with the art? My photo is far less convincing, but by the time it becomes apparent – as confirmed when they vanish – that these are staggeringly well-realised holographic figures, you are trapped in the question of whether you are implicated as a virtual voyeur – if that is a category – or are simply looking as you should at an artwork by Lizzie Deacon…
Levi van Gelder: ‘Ötza, Uninterrupted’, 2025, at De Ateliers
Five screens set into Neolithic rock formations of papier-mâché show Levi van Gelder performing for ten minutes each as a 5,300-year-old mummified fanfiction entrepreneur and drag adaptation of Ötzi the Iceman, brought back to life in various scenarios – here on the analyst’s couch. It sounds plain wacky, but Ötza’s look is compelling, and the camp delivery and playfully anachronistic jokes soon draw you in to what is described as ‘a meta-textualised account of misrepresentation, questioning and resisting claims to truth’. Plenty of theory, but also plenty of fun: I predict Ötza will become a fixture at Biennales.