'Tele Grey Flamingo Pink'

With with Nanna van Heest, Carla Klein and Marleen van Wijngaarden.

Nanna van Heest is a versatile artist and researcher specializing in color. She views the world as a vast universe of color and constantly explores how colors influence each other and tell new stories. Her curiosity about color is the driving force behind all her work, where she places personal associations, memories, and narratives at the forefront.

Nanna's ongoing research focuses on the value of subjective color perception. Through dialogue, observation exercises, and hands-on visual experiments, she explores ways to develop color concepts alongside existing color theories. Her approach questions objective color theories and creates space for more personal interpretations of color. The optical interaction and personal associations with colors lie at the heart of her work.

Nanna van Heest studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Fine Arts and Design Education program at the Willem de Kooning Academy, which contributed to her broad perspective on design and art. Her professional practice is deeply rooted in interdisciplinary research, presentation, and education. Her studio serves as an experimental space where she tests and explores new concepts, allowing her to bring theory into practice, resulting in visual works that both explore and challenge.

How do we perceive color? What associations do we have with colors, and how do they influence our perception of information? Can we tell a story and spark imagination through color alone? Can colors be as powerful as images or words?

Nanna's research distinguishes between simply looking at color and consciously seeing color. Her vision embraces a holistic approach, where she believes that the study of color should be a collective process encompassing multiple disciplines and perspectives. In addition to her autonomous work and artistic research, N. designs interactive workshops that encourage participants to discover and strengthen their own relationship with color. She challenges them to see, re-experience, and apply color in their own creations.

In Nanna's practice, exhibitions of autonomous work, the design of workshops, giving lectures, and providing color consultancy for clients go hand in hand. She is constantly seeking new ways to tell the story of color, not only through visual means but also through language, memory, and association. Through her work, she invites others to experience the world of color in new ways and connect their own unique stories.

Carla Klein (1970) lives and works in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and completed a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (1994–1995). For three decades, Klein has explored the relationship between digital and analog photography and painting, as well as the layered nature of creating and interpreting images. Using her own photography as a starting point, Klein pushes the original image toward abstraction in a way that reveals different paths to representation. Enlarged from negative to snapshot, and from snapshot to canvas, her sublime landscapes become objects, distanced enough from their initial subject to generate new meanings.

Carla Klein paints the world as it presents itself to her. Her work is not painted from, but as a photograph or print: she translates not only the image to the canvas but also the materiality of the photo or print itself. In this way, Klein's paintings emerge not just as reproductions but as interpretations of the reality presented by these prints, exposing the influence of contemporary visual culture on our perception of the world. She often paints in series, emphasizing the repetitive nature of photographing and approaching an image, creating a separate world isolated from the one from which it originated.

"I often paint desolate (urban) environments. Worlds within worlds, where you cannot stay for long and which always have a closed-off character; swimming pools, airports, subway stations, empty and wild landscapes, and botanical greenhouses. These are enclosed areas, strange and empty. It seems as though there is immense space and freedom, but that can only be observed from a distance or experienced pleasantly for a short time, after which it becomes oppressive or even unbearable. In a sense, you don't belong to the image you are looking at. I love the contrasts hidden in images like these.

While my earlier work was mostly based on photographs, during and shortly after the COVID-19 period, I based my paintings on cheap and easily reproducible prints. The glossy surface and lack of depth made the images on the prints appear tinny and flat. Similar to the effects of the pandemic restrictions, the prints showed a world that was closed off and unreachable. Through this series, I began to focus more on the interaction between analog and digital photography. The negative holders I use to digitally scan my negatives have become an element I enjoy incorporating. They reveal the process and formation of an image and bring a layered quality and motion in depth to the final composition of the painting, where I want this element to interact with the painted image of the photograph, the paint, and the space."

"All of these visual processes, whether they occur consciously or unconsciously (inside or outside our body), are presented in a more intensified, attractive, and ultimately more understandable way. This has traditionally been one of the functions of visual art, and it applies especially to Carla Klein's work, where painting, photography, and the 'ordinary' or 'human' gaze constantly interact with each other, as well as with the real, material matter from which a two-dimensional image is made. Facets, dimensions, and layers of seeing, photographing, and painting merge like in a chemical process, to the point where the identity of the original elements partially disappears, creating new, unexpected connections."

"Photographs freeze a moment in time, placing it instantly in the past. The idea that duration could exist—that what is seen continues—might be possible, but it is certain that the photographic image itself is already 'over,' simply because it was taken earlier. With paintings, as argued by Rodin and Merleau-Ponty, it is different: what is painted can suggest movement, but also a form of actuality or even eternity. The 'defects' in Carla Klein's paintings, derived from photography, similarly make a process and thus the passage of time visible. However, they also thematize seeing—more than a photo can, these paintings stretch the moment of perception by making visible the layers and moments that separate us from reality."

—Christophe van Gerrewey, The Chemistry of Seeing, Ivory Black, Deep Orange Yellow