UNIX Gallery is pleased to present Dissolution, a debut Houston solo exhibition of paintings from Dutch artist Ellen de Meijer. The exhibition showcases artworks from the artist’s Digital Divide series which highlights the ever-evolving interplay between personal connectivity and post-modern technology. Dissolution opens with a reception for the artist at Unix Gallery, located at 4411 Montrose Boulevard, on Friday, January 8 from 6 - 8 PM.
An artist Q&A will be held on January 9, 2016, from 3 - 5 PM.
In Dissolution, 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.
“The series Digital Divide is about all of us. The last 20 years we have experienced an enormous evolution mainly driven by technology 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 feeling of sympathetic tension and pathos, simultaneously. Her portraits show figures of successful repute, yet vulnerable with empty gazes. Ellen de Meijer’s figures are armed with digital gadgets such as Google Glasses or iPhones, which refer to our zeitgeist of access to information and power. This proliferation of technology becomes a point of dependency while our human instincts docilely move to the background. Often her figures are portrayed with small, bizarre objects or wearing rubber cleaning gloves that are symbolic of a societal obsession with sterilization and unattainable perfection and allude to the subtle physical boundaries we employ that enable the disconnect mimicked in our duplicitous relationship with advancing technologies.
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.