I associate the Netherlands with the cutting-edge of art. And I do not just mean the cutting edge of our contemporary art scene. Looking back, art history evidences the importance of the country to arts' continual development; to the formation of the art world as we know it today. Genre painting and Dutch still lifes, domestic interior and landscape scenes, portraiture, Modernism, Conceptualism all have a home in the Netherlands, with artistic developments ushered in by big names such as Bosch, Rembrandt, Vermeer, van Gogh, Mondrian and Brown being coeval with shifts in industrialisation and global commerce–coeval with colonial violences also.
As the Dutch capital turns 750, it feels timely to reflect on how this history continues in our present; specifically, to reflect on the structures nurturing the next generation of cutting-edge artists. The Rijksakademie seems like a fitting place to locate this looking.
Established in 1870 by the Dutch King William III, today the Rijksakademie operates as a two-year ‘post-academic’ residency programme–a format uniquely abundant across the Netherlands. Supporting 50 international artists annually, the programme foregrounds studio practice, technical skill development and critical dialogue with peers and advisors. Importantly, the programme aims to be a minimal financial burden. Alongside a free private studio, and access to state-of-the-art facilities, each artist receives a budget to create new work (€2,500 per year) as well as a stipend to support their living costs in Amsterdam (€18,000 in 2025/2026). To note, there is a €1,875 participation fee to be paid yearly, however, and artists are asked to find financial supporters to help cover the costs associated with their time on the programme. (Minimal burdens?)
With over 1600 applications from 111 countries in 2024, this dream context* is rather sought after; recognised as an environment that propels artists to the forefront of the art world. Case in point, current and recent participants have featured in both the last iterations of the Venice Biennale and documenta, receiving solo presentations at Art Basel | Basel, as well as showing at renowned public institutions across the globe–MoMA PS1 (New York), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), KW Berlin to name a few.
Every year, on the occasion of Amsterdam Art Week, the Rijksakademie opens its doors to the art world and the wider public. This ‘Open Studios’ provides a first look at participating artists’ work, allowing visitors to witness the cutting edge of tomorrow. As I prime myself for the event, I have picked out ‘five artists to watch’.
Sandra Poulson (b. 1995, Angola)
More than discrete objects, isolated and taking up space, Poulson’s sculptural forms often operate together, creating inquisitive installations; haptic environments that question cultural codes, and critically, that question how these ‘norms’ circulate from centres of power out into landscapes labelled as uninhabitable and therefore in need of changing–the task of decoloniality, at the most domestic scale, underpins Poulson’s practice. Working through auto-ethnography, Poulson uses vernacular materials–discarded furniture, soap, textile refuse, et cetera–to re-present domestic life as a coy assemblage. Appearing materially harmless, this staging positions the tropes of coloniality, be these familial (plastic patio chairs, see Hope As A Praxis, 2021) or militaristic (bulletproof vests, The Halo Trust, 2021), as flaccid icons. Poulson’s most recent body of work Este quarto parece uma República! [This Bedroom Looks Like a Republic!] utilises autobiographical reflection and archaeology to dismantle the cultural transformations she experienced growing up amidst the Angolan Civil War (1975- 2002). Rather than unravelling the personal impact of this fight against European colonisation, the sculptural artworks that form this installation use this conflict as a case study, making us conscious of how nations build themselves through domestic settings.
For the Rijksakademie Open Studios, Poulson is exploring the colonial connotations of soap. Specifically, how soap is used at a societal level becoming a coded sign for purity and therefore value, to think of these terms colonially. A ‘should’ vital to familial normality, Poulson will embrace soap’s material slipperiness to accentuate how asymmetric power relations (colonial thinking) seep into the everyday fabric of social life.
Nora Aurrekoetxea (b. 1989, Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain)
Aurrekoetxea’s sculptural artworks emerge from and invite relationality. From what I have seen her works are often human and greater than human in scale, resembling bodies writhing or at least as forms that make newly sensable the presence of bodies once in a space. This is not to insinuate that Aurrekoetxea’s works are overtly figurative. These bodies are totally abstracted, gestural, more like spectral memories contorting before our eye, ushering us into ambiguous relationships. Positioned within an exhibition space, these grotesque non-bodies conjure anti-chambers, accentuating the interdependency between bodies and a surrounding as well as allowing unpredictable dialogues to happen. This sense of unpredictability resonates through Aurrekoetxea’s creative process. Embracing collaborative research and body-to-body exchange with others, often through writing, movement workshops and conversations, Aurrekoetxea transforms shared moments of intimacy into something emotive and experiential.
For the Rijksakademie Open Studios Aurrekoetxea, who is now in her last year on the residency programme, will present a number of artworks that deal with ideas of lost inhabitation and human erasure. Specifically, the physical aspects of a space which allude to previous inhabitants. Alongside physical casts and reconstructed architectures of spaces Aurrekoetxea has occupied over the last two years, she will work with Adam Russell-Jones to convene a three-day workshop exploring the physical and emotional connotations of falling. This collective research will culminate in a performance, where automatic writing will guide participants' movements through a space.
Avril Corroon (b. County Westmeath, Ireland)
Drawing upon social and cultural histories, Corroon’s multifaceted artworks have previously explored situations and sites where biopolitical regimes have rendered everyday life inhospitable. As an example, her installation Got Damp (TACO!, London, 2023) focused on urban housing crises and the effect of these conditions on the precariat within contemporary Britain. Created following three-years of research, for the project Corroon provided 55 households with energy efficient dehumidifiers and support to manage damp within their homes, in return these household shared their experience of living in these conditions–the impact of damp on their lives–as well as gifting Corroon damp spores that became the material for her artwork. More than something bookish, or experienced as speculative research in the large, Got Damp transformed this human to human exchange into an immersive installation–a quasi-clinical plant room filled with plastic containers, transparent tubing and a television replaying a newly produced film.
Corroon is currently researching representations of time and nature; the ways we cling to, or fight against, constructed visions in an age of precarity, political and ecological. Bringing together a millennium time capsule–which she contributed to as an eight-year-old scout living in the Irish midlands–400 kilos of recycled artificial snow and her research into gene-edited potato plants, this body of work will question how simulacra function across the social imaginary, unpicking how systems of production control our human experience of the world all about.
Smári Róbertsson (b. 1992, Vestmannaeyjabær, Iceland)
A sense of futility and the folkloric runs through Róbertsson’s practice. Ranging from cute gouache paintings and twee wood sculptures, to narrative sounds, searching installations and collaborative performances, his artworks deal with the hidden and unknown, or rather they ‘poke the unknown with a really long stick’, to riff on a quote from his 2021 artwork The Father Of Eighteen Elves. Like folk stories themselves, Róbertsson's artworks have a lighthearted overtone; they are often materially low-fi and easy to pass on–echoing the economy of folktales. In an omnipotent digital age, where so much of what we see and are told is rendered as an ultra-sheeny fake-news-type-myth, this material quality is sly, drawing us in. Following the fidelity of Róbertsson's mischievous semi-fictions, everyday life becomes evocatively odd; the overlooked, hidden or unseen aspects of existence teeter newly into view, messing up the systematic ordering of our seemingly mundane world.
Recently, Róbertsson has been working on a series of monologues and short songs. Falling between lusty odes and soapbox proclamations, these narratives echo the lyricism of troubadour poetry, juxtaposing thoughts of unrequited love and political satire. At the Rijksakademie Open Studios, Róbertsson intends to present these texts on and alongside a series of DIY soapboxes, hodgepodge creations slackly made from plywood. Adorned with snippets of his new writings, together these boxes will create an inhabitable concrete poem; an ambiguous site and an impromptu stage.
Nazif Lopulissa (b. 1991, the Netherlands)
Lopulissa questions the limits of painting–to apply an arbitrary term. His canvases, be these cut-up weaves or bleached still lives, blur the line between two and three dimensionality. Refusing common-sense conceptions of what and how a painting is materially, Lopulissa embraces erasure and destruction to highlight how images dissolve and malform over time, constantly in a state of becoming. Making a connection between IKAT weaving processes–a traditional method of weaving practised in Indonesia and the Maluku Islands–and philosophical understandings of life, Lopulissa's autobiographical practice foregrounds a vision where life is ‘a patchwork of amalgamated worldviews, traditions and perspectives incompatible but interlinked regardless’, to quote the artist. Deliberately in-between states, visually washed-out-reminiscent, Lopulissa’s artworks directly speak to his familial experiences of migration, aesthetically foregrounding the freeing effect of liminality over colonial ideologies of social assimilation; his recent series of bleached canvases challenge this social ideal, asking ‘How does one record and preserve a (family) history that has been suppressed [by colonial forces in the past and in the present]?’
Lopulissa is currently working on a publication called Strange Soil. Departing from a personal narrative about a scarf found in his studio–a scarf belonging to his deceased grandfather–the publication brings together a range of artworks made between 2023 and 2025, essays and an interview, providing a soft insight into Lopulissa’s patchwork refusal of conventions.
(1) See Timo Demollin’s 2025 text ‘Imagine a Rijksakademie led by artists’ – On a future-proof Rijksakademie’ (Metropolis M, No 1 – 2025) for a critical insight into the shifting financial structure of the Rijksakademie and his concerns over the organisation's increasing reliance on a small number of private individuals. These insights render the ‘dream context’ of the residency programme as something precarious.
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Amsterdam Art Week runs from 20 - 25 May. The Rijksakademie Open Studios runs from 22 - 25 May at Sarphatistraat 470, Amsterdam.
Toby Üpson is a writer based in Glasgow. His first collection of poems will be published by La chaise jaune in spring 2025. He is the writing mentor for What Could Should Curating Do's education programme as well as an Ambassador for Amsterdam Art.
