Milva Stutz, Sander van Deurzen
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17 April, 2025The exhibition Bending, Dripping, Stumbling brings together the works of Milva Stutz and Sander van Deurzen, two artists whose practices engage in a rich dialogue about transformation, materiality, and the fragile nature of human experience. Though they work in different mediums—Stutz through drawing and video, van Deurzen through painting—their works share deep thematic and formal connections. Both artists embrace movement, organic forms, and the idea of things in flux. They are drawn to moments of instability and transition, whether in physical materials or in emotional and relational states. Their use of color, often bright yet carrying an undercurrent of unease, echoes the expressive tensions found in the works of James Ensor, where vibrancy and melancholy exist side by side. There is also an element of humor and absurdity in their work—tragedy and comedy intertwined, creating images that are both unsettling and strangely familiar.
Van Deurzen’s paintings push against the constraints of the traditional canvas, embracing softness, fluidity, and a rejection of strict geometry. He allows paint to drip and sag, emphasizing its materiality before it dries into something fixed. His canvases curve and droop, as if fatigued, their stretcher bars intentionally bent so that they lean away from the wall, creeping toward the floor. There is a physical, almost bodily quality to his work—paintings that do not stand upright in rigid perfection but instead surrender to gravity, becoming pliant and mutable. His use of bold, often clashing colors enhances this sense of distortion, creating compositions that feel alive and in motion, resisting the stillness often associated with painting.
Stutz, too, works with movement and transformation, though in a different register. In her large-scale charcoal and pastel drawings, she captures moments of tension and intimacy, focusing on human relationships in states of change. Her drawing process is tactile and immediate—using dry materials, she smudges and blends with her fingers, leaving behind traces of touch. The figures in her work are often caught in moments of uncertainty: a person gazing directly at the viewer from a bed, passengers contorting in response to turbulence mid-flight, individuals caught between connection and alienation. Like van Deurzen’s paintings, her work resists finality—lines shift and dissolve, colors emerge from the collision of surfaces, and figures seem to waver between presence and absence.
What unites their practices most profoundly is their shared interest in transience—the way things evolve, disappear, or take on new forms. While Stutz explores this through emotions, relationships, and the passage of time, van Deurzen expresses it through the very materiality of paint. Both artists challenge ideas of stability, permanence, and control, embracing the beauty of imperfection and unpredictability. Their works reject fixed meanings in favor of open-ended narratives, where things are always in the process of becoming something else.
In Bending, Dripping, Stumbling, the dialogue between their works unfolds in layers: between soft and solid, wet and dry, structure and collapse, intimacy and absurdity. Both artists, in their own way, remind us that transformation is at the heart of both art and life—nothing is static, and everything is always in motion.