Mirjam Vreeswijk (b. 1997, Gorinchem, the Netherlands) lives and works in the Netherlands. She took a BA in fine art at HKU in 2018 and an MFA in painting at the Frank Mohr Institute. Her paintings hold a permanent tension: beautiful and repellent, dark and cheerful, grand and decorative at once. Formless natural events, waterfalls, lakes, lava flows, explosions, are made solid and ornamental, shaped into roses or tied with a bow, and theatre curtains recur as a way of framing what is shown and what is withheld. The work begins as collage, from an archive of shiny ribbons, cardboard, fabric and images taken from decorative craft manuals of the 1970s and 1980s, assembled first as maquettes and only then painted, which gives the results something of product photography, still life and landscape painting at the same time. She taps the canvas, rubs paint back with cloths, sets glints into copper pots that hold a reflection of the artist at work.
She won the Ron Mandos Best of Graduates Public Prize in 2018, was named Art Talent of the Year by Stichting Kunstweek in 2019 and won the Kunstliefde Award in 2022, having been nominated for the Buning Brongers Prize. Her work has been supported by the Mondriaan Fund and the Amarte Fund. Solo exhibitions include The Curtain Rises at Galerie Fleur & Wouter, Amsterdam (2023) and a solo presentation at Art Island in IJmuiden (2024), and her work has been shown at Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles and Hong Kong, at Anthony Gallery in New York and at Art Busan in South Korea.
Vreeswijk has worked with Plan X since 2024, when the gallery presented her work at Contemporary Art Now Ibiza, followed by Liquid Shadows, a two person exhibition with Billy Gibney at Plan X Milan, open from November 2024 to January 2025.
