Niels Smits van Burgst was born in the Netherlands in 1970 and graduated at the Royal Academy in the Hague in 1993. Since then his paintings have been exhibited in New York, Berlin, Amterdam, Brussels, and many more cities across Europe. In 2013 Museum 'de Buitenplaats' honoured his work with a retrospective. He won the 'van Ommeren de Voogd'-price-2007 and the Aku-2011. His paintings are in many collections all over the world.
Zerp Gallery: www.zerp.nl
“In 1994, I decided to depict what it is like to be alive. I started painting my life and added some friends and acquaintances to the stories. Later on, exhibition visitors and party-people joined in the scenes. In 2004, I entered the World Wide Web.
Private pictures are shared through the Net as souvenirs of an experience one can never take part in. The images are like film-stills of a movie you've never seen. I browse these anonymous fragments, trying to get involved, imagining to be there with these guys. I try to revive these shared moments and add them to my own painted adventures.
I show slices of a civilized world in which excesses are channeled through stylized formats like Art, porn, music, Internet, TV, religion or sports. We suppress lust, sadism, aggression and even euphoria to modest levels to keep interaction civilized, although these tendencies always lure behind the surface. Indulgence might be a hidden driver for men's action; it cannot show. Anything might happen today but preferably not in public. Anything might surface but probably not today.
My paintings show men, trapped in their daily life, caught up in my brush-strokes. They will exist there, without a plot to their stories.
My 'friends' lives get romanticized by the act of painting. Will you get involved in their boredom, jokes and modest euphoria? They won't; the inhabitants of the paintings share business nor idleness; they simply exhibit being alive.”
Niels Smits van Burgst, 2014
