UNIX Gallery is pleased to present Dutch artist Ellen de Meijer’s first New York solo show, Digital Divide. This latest series of paintings follows de Meijer’s successful showings at Art Stage Singapore, Art Toronto and Art Miami. The opening reception for Digital Divide will be held at UNIX Gallery on February 5, from 6 – 8 PM, and runs through March 5, 2015.
In Digital Divide, Ellen de Meijer’s works express a ruminative perspective from what you don’t see to what you feel everyday. De Meijer intends to capture the impact of our postmodern society on human behavior and the conflict between our basic human instincts of love, greed, fear and community, and our constant desire to progress and succeed.
“Digital Divide is about all of us. The last 20 years we have ex- perienced an enormous evolution mainly driven by technolo- gy and the digital revolution. But our human instincts have not changed, despite that our modern society often expects us to ignore these. It’s this tension that inspires my work,” says de Meijer.
Ellen de Meijer’s paintings tend to give the viewer a unique feel- ing of sympathetic tension and pathos, simultaneously. Her por- traits show figures of successful repute, yet vulnerable with an empty gaze. De Meijer’s figures are armed with digital gadgets such as Google Glass or iPhones, which refer to our zeitgeist of access to information and power. This proliferation of technology be- comes a point of dependency while our human instincts docilely move to the background. Often they are portrayed with small, bizarre objects or wearing rubber cleaning gloves that are symbolic of a societal obsession with sterilization and unattainable perfection.
Ellen de Meijer (b. 1955) is known in Europe for her fine technique and level of detail in her work. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tilburg (the Netherlands) and owned an appraised art school in the Netherlands for many years. Various European art collectors, such as the Dutch art collection of the Van den Broek Foundation, hold de Meijer’s work.