Collaborating Artists: Available works

Lisse Declercq is a Belgian artist born in Lüdenscheid (DE). She has an MFA in Painting from the MAD-FAC School of Arts in Hasselt (BE). Her work has been shown at de Warande in Turnhout and the 2021 Triennial of Bruges. 

Declercq elaborated her painting techniques and foundations by watching makeup tutorials on Youtube. She bends this language to stage social selfies, an awareness of a certain reality, and its effects on ways of looking. In this culture of the copy, this millennial painter moves between fantasy and reality while calling into question authenticity. Declercq questions the longing for perfection, the copy-paste Instagram/ media aesthetics as an impossible, endless battle of unwillingly and unknowingly playing a part in a “reality show” in a virtual media reality.

Ciro Duclos (°1991, lives and works in Amsterdam) is a Dutch artist with a fascination for insignificant materials, everyday objects and the perception of space. After his graduation from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2015, he immediately starten producing his own art. 

Cito’s Love for materials who “don’t want to coöperate” like concrete, glass and marble is a crucial influence in his work. The materials research is the works’ foundation. 

Though reflections, perspective shifts and framing he alters the perception of time and space. What do you see and where is the boundary between reality and imagination? 

Ciro Duclos is the co-founder of Indebt Studio, an arts collective that do both multidisciplinary research and organise expositions.

Gao Hang (°1991) in Baoding, China, currently lives in works in Houston, Texas. Hang moved to Houston, Texas in 2015, to attain an MFA in Painting from the University of Houston, after obtaining a Bachelor of Art degree in Oil Painting from Capital Normal University in Beijing, China, 2013. His work has been exhibited globally in art venues. Recently, Hang has expanded his artistic practice into the digital realm of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens.

“I am sure my art process has something to do with my habits and obsessions. I mostly listen to standup comedy while making my work. I enjoy standup comedy that challenges general beliefs, and political correctness, yet at its core is negotiating between the observations, language, and laughter of a given performance. Then you realize that it’s no paradox, but a good conversation between the performer and the audience. At some point, my paintings are like standup comedy, they can only do so much about solving real problems. But brutal honesty, absurdity, and humor are very powerful qualities in any type of conversation.”

Jean-Baptiste Janisset(1990), is a French artist based in Marseille. The works of Janisset conjures and intertwine complex narratives. The artist questions the writing of collective history and how conscious we are of it. Who do we pay tribute to? What should we commemorate? Which icons, for who and why In this great horde of events, contexts inevitably impact the way we see collective history. 

With his molds, the artist creates new objects, archival-sculptures of his ongoing research. 

Jean-Baptiste Janisset challenges the making of memory, monument and history. He  immerses himself in the daily and spiritual life of places from Nantes to Libreville via Senegal, Italy, Algeria and Corsica. “I want to tell a story, a sort of syncretic awakening.” 

As a graduate of the School of Fine Arts in Nantes, he has already shown his work in Japan, Benin, Germany, Algeria, and has participated in Paris in prestigious events such as the Prix de la Fondation Emerige, the Salon Jeune Creation or the Salon de Montrouge. He recently exhibited as a solo show at Atelier Chifonnier in Dijon, at Galerie Alain Gutharc (Paris) and as a group show at MRAC Sérignan curated by Charlotte Cosson & Emmanuelle Luciani.  

MAGDA KIRK (Magdalena Kirklewska) was born in 1990 in Poland. She graduated from Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, Poland (2015). After graduation she had a break from art practice and reinvented herself by working in different fields and travelling. In 2019 she returned to painting full time with a fresh concept and started to develop her style. She made a few exhibitions in Poland in 2020. In 2021 she took part in a group show in GR Gallery in New York and started to work internationally. She works with GR gallery in New York, Dopeness Art Lab in Taipei and Plan X in Milan. 

”I like to think about my works as mirrors. They are like reflections of ordinary, contemporary people, distorted under the influence of cultural expectations. Anonymous, tattooed bodies became the basic characters of my work as an image of a human without identity, covered by leftovers of pop culture and trapped in their self-perception. I find it fascinating how relative human perception is and how it is shaped by the culture they live in, with no real point of reference.” 

Erica Mao (°1994) is best known for her atmospheric layered paintings that stitch together disparate spaces into alternate realities. Depictions of wild, imaginative landscapes explore the feelings of fear, tension, and suspense by following the path of her characters as they weave their way in and out of the narrative. Mao has exhibited throughout the US at galleries such as Rachel Uffner Gallery, RubberFactory, and Steve Turner Gallery. Born in Maryland, Mao attended Parsons School of Design and received her BFA in 2016. She also received her MFA from Columbia University in 2021. She lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens.

Janne Schimmel (NL, °1993) is a Dutch artist and designer, who graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven. His practice concerns itself with the inner workings of both hardware and software, which he deconstructs physically and digitally, exposing the frameworks that determine how we think about technology as a society. Moving seamlessly from digital to physical design, he employs a wide range of production techniques such as 3D-modeling and 3D-printing to traditional crafts such as wood and metalworking. He is also part of the design duo Schimmel und Schweikle. Previous solo exhibitions include Pillow Pillow at Collectible (Brussels) and A Tree Full of Splinters at Everyday Gallery (Antwerp). Participation in group exhibitions include the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Design Museum (Gent), MK&G museum (Hamburg) and Tools Galerie (Paris) amongst others.

Trude Viken (°1969, NO) is a ‘colorist’ without restrictions. Her paintings are saturated with swirls of fleshtones, ashy greys and witchy greens coupled with bright red, orange, yellow, and luminous pinks. The smell of oil paint lingers on and tones, both earthy and unnatural, elicit both eroticism and repulsion. 

Viken’s work requires an audience for its physicality, a terrain of oil paint. In this way, they are landscapes of weather as unpredictable as mood. A face becomes a hairy green mass with bubble gum pink base, white strokes like the edges of clouds or wings. Her portraits from everyday life develop into fantasies expressing our interior lives and our most palpable feelings, they seduce through their psychological penetration. With Viken’s hand, layers of oil paint become whirling eyes, nose, mouth, ecstatic grimaces or smirks, finished when she decides so. Rows of twisted, kneaded faces hung together like a ghoulish family album of passing moods and impulse. The final marks different from the original swaths. Shapes are dissolved as the layers of paint can be repainted many times; almost anything is allowed. Viken's first solo exhibition in New York was at Fortnight Institute, New York in 2018.