25-02-2021

Dutch Design Daily

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Jan van der Ploeg www.janvanderploeg.com

Wall Paintings

By 25-02-2021

Jan van der Ploeg likes to work with an organised and recognisable graphical visual language that he has carefully constructed throughout his career. Since 1997, he works with a basic form that occurs in many of his paintings and functions like an anchor in the the endless potentiality of forms and shapes. This form is a rectangle with rounded corners, which he calls ‘grip’.

Another recurring element is the use of patterns created through repetition of forms. Van der Ploeg’s paintings are close to his sketching process, which is the premise of all his art work. It is a careful process of planning and constructing, which takes place before painting even begins. Making a composition is like shuffling with graphical building blocks and experimenting with an infinite palette of tints and colours. This is Van der Ploeg’s confined playground, in which he finds utter freedom and pleasure to create forever more surprising but very well balanced combinations.

Jan van der Ploeg (1959, Amsterdam) graduated from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and Croydon College of Art in London and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. He was awarded the Royal Award for Modern Painting in 1990. He founded the artist-run gallery PS projectspace in Amsterdam in 1999.