Gijs Assmann

By making drawings, collages, sculptures and (public) spatial installations, Gijs Assmann expresses his connection to human emotions and the facts of life: penetrating, disarming, confronting, personal and sincere. The question "How can we live?" is central to his work, where he offers his audience the counterbalance to mankind's powerlessness and clumsiness. A constant in Assmann's work is the series 'vanitas images', which he has been working on since 1992. Each work in this series is dedicated to a friend or acquaintance and can be interpreted as a personal portrait made with the means of a still life. They originate from the idea that everything known to that person is perishable, while at the same time commemorate the memory of that person. Assmann's Vanitas images refer lightly to the classical pictorial elements of the still-life tradition. With a playfulness and free choice of materials, he tries to merge cheerfulness and melancholy into an image, sometimes quite lightheartedly or as an artisanal virtuoso.