Aukje Koks
19 Jan - 23 Feb 2008
AUKJE KOKS
"Take illusion apart, add reality"
An almost empty room with open windows, the Venetian blinds moving with a suggestion that something or someone has just flown out of one of the windows. Painted soap-bubbles that float up from a black hole and evoke a feeling that is hard to define. What is their origin: an alternative reality? This suggestion lies at the heart of the work of Aukje Koks (Gilze-Rijen, 1977).
Koks graduated from St Joost’s Academy of the Arts in Breda in 2002, and was awarded the Royal Award for Painting in 2005. She recently completed her first year at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam. Her egg tempera paintings are clearly narrative. Colourful spaces are characterised by a certain emptiness. At the same time, however, we are left with a very strong sense of the presence of something invisible, or of an event that has gone unnoticed. Aukje Koks is able to create a certain atmosphere by making us conscious of what we cannot actually see.
With her most recent work, displayed in the Playstation exhibition, Koks goes one step further. The suggestive elements remain, but they are combined with an exploration of the nature of painting itself. ‘What is a painting and where does it stop?’ are just two of the many questions she puts to herself. She stretches the medium’s limits experimentally by painting directly onto the wall, or by presenting monoprints and fragments cut out of her own paintings as a new entity. Some of the work looks more abstract, but it is still related to the intangible appearance of things and ideas. The bubbles emerging from a hole, for instance, are followed on the wall, as they rise, by painted book-jackets (Parenthesis). ‘Compositions of thoughts’ is how she describes this herself. At the same time, she also plays with our own thoughts; is what we see flat or three-dimensional, is it painted on canvas or on the wall?
Aukje Koks continues to express her fascination with the relationship between illusion and reality. In the illusion and atmosphere that she can produce, as a creator, the metaphors in her work, such as the door and the curtain, retain their link with the outside world.
"Take illusion apart, add reality"
An almost empty room with open windows, the Venetian blinds moving with a suggestion that something or someone has just flown out of one of the windows. Painted soap-bubbles that float up from a black hole and evoke a feeling that is hard to define. What is their origin: an alternative reality? This suggestion lies at the heart of the work of Aukje Koks (Gilze-Rijen, 1977).
Koks graduated from St Joost’s Academy of the Arts in Breda in 2002, and was awarded the Royal Award for Painting in 2005. She recently completed her first year at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam. Her egg tempera paintings are clearly narrative. Colourful spaces are characterised by a certain emptiness. At the same time, however, we are left with a very strong sense of the presence of something invisible, or of an event that has gone unnoticed. Aukje Koks is able to create a certain atmosphere by making us conscious of what we cannot actually see.
With her most recent work, displayed in the Playstation exhibition, Koks goes one step further. The suggestive elements remain, but they are combined with an exploration of the nature of painting itself. ‘What is a painting and where does it stop?’ are just two of the many questions she puts to herself. She stretches the medium’s limits experimentally by painting directly onto the wall, or by presenting monoprints and fragments cut out of her own paintings as a new entity. Some of the work looks more abstract, but it is still related to the intangible appearance of things and ideas. The bubbles emerging from a hole, for instance, are followed on the wall, as they rise, by painted book-jackets (Parenthesis). ‘Compositions of thoughts’ is how she describes this herself. At the same time, she also plays with our own thoughts; is what we see flat or three-dimensional, is it painted on canvas or on the wall?
Aukje Koks continues to express her fascination with the relationship between illusion and reality. In the illusion and atmosphere that she can produce, as a creator, the metaphors in her work, such as the door and the curtain, retain their link with the outside world.