Untitled, 2014 Painting

Rob Bouwman is as a painter in the field of contemporary abstraction. But in more recent works he deliberately takes a distance to his position as a painter by experimenting with different media. In his case ‘the crossing of traditional artistic borders of form and medium’ has almost become a theme in itself in his work. He used to make enigmatic black and white, abstract paintings with curling tubes that remind of a strange universe, later on he ‘penetrated’ these paintings by metaphorically exploring them from the inside with a camera, or taking distance by installing them as miniatures in strange cabinets. Whereas in his paintings and drawings, the control of the medium and the gesture is in the centre of attention, in his video work he makes use of breaks, accidental effects and irregularities to evoke a ‘painterly’ world. By balancing on a twirling-point between visible reality and pure abstraction, between picture and image, a duality arises in the works. Which is according to Rob Bouwman the essence of painting and drawing. That duality seems to multiply in his most recent three-dimensional works. His objects with much smaller sized paintings, evoke associations with a ‘white cube’ or a studio and other traditional display cases. While they feel like monumental spaces, sometimes even museum-like, they are at the same time spatial objects in the shape of manageable, simple constructions. Rob Bouwman (1981) A.I.R 37PK Vol.22, p012012