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.