FORM 21 - 2024
Jan van der Ploeg
Dignity
Jan van der Ploeg is a Dutch artist, born in 1959 in Amsterdam, where he lives and works. His artistic training includes studies at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten and Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, as well as the Croydon College of Art in London. Van der Ploeg is renowned for his large-scale wall paintings and editions of works on paper, marked by a distinctive graphic vocabulary and expansive use of color.
Through a reduced lexicon of recurring simple forms, the artist plays with rhythm, repetition, and tone to create a wide range of effects, from intense graphic expressions to complex and minimalistic spatial illusions. Over the last three decades, he has produced more than four hundred site-sensitive wall paintings in museums, galleries, corporate, public, and private spaces worldwide. His wall paintings, whether temporary or permanent, are conceived in direct response to the specifics of an architectural space or condition, embracing and activating the full height and width of a wall. These works, often large in scale, recalibrate our perception of space, varying from being strongly graphic to spatially confounding, overwhelming both visually the eyes and physically the body.
The project he has worked on for us depicts a series of vertical forms that stretch upward, rigid yet capable of movement through their repetition and extension. A simplified motif where repetitiveness becomes meditation and the white space between one line and the next offers a "visual breath," a dialogue between solids and voids closely juxtaposed.
In 1990 Jan van der Ploeg has been awarded the Royal Award for Modern Painting.
He exhibited his work extensively in both solo and group exhibitions in Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Selected exhibitions include: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; MOMA PS1, New York; Kunsthaus Baselland, Bazel; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Kopenhagen; Kunstverein Heilbronn, Heilbronn; Von Bartha, Bazel; Minus Space, New York; Sikkema Jenkins, New York; Wellington City Art Gallery, Wellington; Starkwhite, Auckland; Sumer, Auckland; Taubert Contemporary, Berlijn; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney; Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Galerie Les filles du calvaire, Brussel/Parijs; Kunsthal, Rotterdam; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin; Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, Stuttgart; Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aaken; Kunst-Station, Wolfsburg; Perth Institut of Contemporary Art, Perth; Museum für Neue Kunst/ZKM, Karlsruhe; Museum of Concrete Art, Ingolstadt; Kunstmuseum der Stadt Ulm, Ulm; CCA Andratx, Mallorca; Mies van der Rohe Haus, Berlijn; Escher in Het Paleis, Den Haag; Museum Villa Mondriaan, Winterswijk; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Kunstmuseum, Den Haag and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
In 1999 Jan van der Ploeg founded the artist-run gallery, PS projectspace in Amsterdam.
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