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Nikki's works are made with great attention and precision and they create a dreamy, mysterious world. They are often poetic portraits of women, created with different techniques and materials. The works stimulate you on a subconscious level and invite you to admire them up close. “I like working with materials such as colored ink, charcoal and pastels. The way I work, with many different steps in the process, ensures that it always remains exciting for me. I never know in advance exactly how a work will turn out. That makes me look forward to every next step. It feels meaningful and satisfying to make something from nothing.” I want to seduce people with my work, I want them to become curious and take a closer look. I always like to add something strange to the portraits, for example spiky animals or angular or organic shapes. The line drawing can lead the meaning of the work in a different direction. I also like to tamper with the prevailing ideal of beauty, for example by painting the skin in spots, as if the figure has skin with a strange structure, almost like a fish or another animal. I like to play with familiarity and alienation. I find those kinds of contradictions fascinating. Attraction and repulsion, tenderness and hardness, connection and loneliness are themes that interest me. I get a lot of inspiration from dreams. I am a heavy dreamer and can remember my dreams every morning. I talk a lot in my sleep and sometimes I seem to laugh or wheeze. My husband and children are used to my sounds, haha! I dream a lot about insects and other animals such as shrimps, birds and fish. You often see this in my work. In addition to dreams, I can be inspired by all kinds of other things, such as a sentence from a book, a song, colors and structures that I see in nature, film-images or old photos. So many things inspire me to make art." Nikki Pelaez (1973) studied at the academy of fine arts in Maastricht. Her work was nominated in 2002 for the "Gilbert de Bontridder-price". In 2003 she received a starters-stipend from the fund of fine arts and design in Amsterdam. Nikki Pelaez grew up in Spain but now lives and works in Maastricht, the Netherlands.