Joyce Overheul, Rinke Nijburg

Under the title ‘Onszelf, die Ander’, Art Gallery O-68 will show works by Joyce Overheul (textile works) and Rinke Nijburg (paintings).

Joyce Overheul (1989) makes works of art from textiles, often based on photography. She works a lot with traditional techniques that have been dismissed as typical women’s hobbies for a long time. She combines this with politically charged topics such as women’s rights, emancipation and feminism, so that a sharp contrast is created between the hard content and the soft material. The work ‘Ter Apel, September 22, 2022,’ is a tapestry embroidered from donated, used buttons. The image shows a refugee camp, reminiscent of the camps in Greece, Turkey and Calais. However, it turns out to be Ter Apel in the apparently well-organized Netherlands. The cloth is embroidered with buttons donated to this project by more than 130 people. Each knot represents humans as a unique individual. Overheul studied Fine Art at the HKU in Utrecht, followed by a master’s degree in Artistic Research at the maHKU. Her work has been exhibited at home and abroad. She also makes commissioned work, with highlights being the solo exhibition ‘Let’s Get Political’ at Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, and the war memorial for resistance woman Truus van Lier for the Municipality of Utrecht. In 2023-2024 she has her second solo museum presentation at Museum W in Weert

Rinke Nijburg (1964) is looking for the existential fate that befell man: the consciousness of being an animal that tries his or her best not to be an animal. To better understand this fate, Nijburg looks back to the origins of man, which is said to be in Africa. In his search for man’s deepest motivations, he encounters the best and the worst of mammals. Every now and then a person manages to rise above himself and everyone else and metamorphoses into a holy son or daughter of the god or gods. But, unfortunately, most individuals of the species fail to do so and the development of compassion remains rudimentary. Some specimens of homo sapiens sapiens fail to tame the predator within themselves at all and degenerate into children of hell. The mammal that poses for the camera and attempts to show ‘the best self’ to others is the starting point for much of the artist’s recent work. Nijburg received many prizes, including the Prix de Rome (1998). His work is represented in more than 30 collections in the Netherlands and abroad.