Miko Veldkamp

  • ABOUT


  • MIKO VELDKAMP

     

    A transplanted New Yorker who was born in Suriname and grew up in the Netherlands, Miko Veldkamp infuses his paintings with a sense of displacement from concrete time and place. Resonant with a feeling of diasporic otherness, his canvases are often populated by figures who are shape-shifting variations of himself, rendered in deamy scenes in translucent layers that elide moments of remembered and imagined experiences. 

     

    By turns playful and sensitive, his mesmerizing paintings typically feature homey, idyllic scenes that are reminiscent of Les Nabis and Expressionism, but they resist the colonial gaze that has encoded readings of cultural otherness along racial, geographic lines and dichotomies of the civilized versus the savage. Veldkamp deploys a combination of thin glazing, dry brushes, opaque surfaces and pointillist marks to build overlapping layers and shifting degrees of translucency. Using reflections, shadows, patterns, and repetitions as psychological metaphors and deliberately playing with cultural markers, types, and stereotypes, his works give rise to complex narratives reflecting on history, belonging, colonialism and urban environments. 

    Veldkamp received a BFA in video and sculpture from the Willem de Kooning Academie, Rotterdam, was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, and was awarded the prestigious Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. He graduated with an MFA from Hunter College, New York, in 2021. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include BB&M, Seoul (2023); Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York (2023); Long Story Short, New York (2023); Southwark Park Galleries, London (2022); and Workplace, London (2022). Group exhibitions include The Here and There, New York (2023); Workplace, Newcastle, UK (2023); Althuis Hofland, Amsterdam (2022); Workplace, London (2022); BB&M, Seoul (2022); Swivel Gallery x Regular Normal, New York (2021); among others. His work was recently selected to be featured in New American Paintings (2023).
  • WORKS


  • EXHIBITIONS


  • MIKO VELDKAMP: POSTCARDS FROM HOME

    MIKO VELDKAMP: POSTCARDS FROM HOME

    4 November - 16 December 2023

    BB&M is pleased to present New York-based painter Miko Veldkamp’s first solo exhibition in Asia. Veldkamp’s work melds his Surinamese, Dutch, and New York past and present experiences together, drawing on elements both private and public, in art history, family photo albums, folklore, landscape, and nature. His dreamy, mesmerizing canvases depict psychological spaces suffused with colonial histories and conflicting yet intertwined cultural narratives exploring shifting notions of personal authenticity at the intersection of the North-South and East-West cultural axes.

     

  • DREAM LIFE

    DREAM LIFE

    21 May - 2 July 2022
    Organized by the renowned curator and critic Dan Cameron, Dream Life brings together five artists who, each in his own distinctive way, are devising new modes of representation in American painting today. Highly regarded among the artistic community, their works are exhibited and collected by prominent institutions, including MoMA, LACMA, the Whitney, and the Metropolitan Museum. Still, little of this art has been given much exposure in Korea. This show provides a snapshot of the artistic energies being generated, particularly in figurative painting, in the creative hubs of America today.
     
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