HANS VAN DER HAM (b.1960) lives and works in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He studied classical piano at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and the Utrecht Conservatory before studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam. Van der Ham is a visual artist whose practice includes painting, drawing, and sculpture. His expressive paintings create an uncanny yet affable atmosphere. A recurring theme of characters exists, not just as archetypal symbols, but as figures within their own right with their own dialogues and agendas. Hans van der Ham paints intuitively and each work evokes the next where layering becomes a liberating condition for something new. Reflecting on his process he says, “The beginning of a painting feels like the setup of an orchestral score, after which the 'soloists' float to the surface of their own accord. Painting is about painting like music is only about music. There is no literal story. The anecdotal content comes from a distant memory.”
ANTON COTTELEER (b.1974) lives and works in Kalmhout, Belgium. He is honoured with a Laureate at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts and holds a Master in Sculpture from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in Antwerp. He initiated his career at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp. Cotteleer is recognised for the combination of modelled human and animal fragments with deconstructed domestic objects. He is interested in the relationship between humans and animals to the domestic biotope, which is seen as authentic and personal within the Western world, yet mostly interchangeable and conducted. Ambiguities and dualities keep the work in a grey zone. Eroticism, innocence, mysticism and banality each claims their presence but is always negated by the other. Visual and substantive contradictions set the tone. As a result, the works are rarely explicit and remain partially elusive. The works contain autobiographical traces in addition to memories from collective memory. Memories, whether fed by personal photographic material or not, are used. However, this is not applied consistently, putting the artist and the viewer in an uncanny position. Questions around the authenticity of memory, truth and illusion intrude.
Both artists have exhibited extensively and thier works are included in numerous public, corporate and private collections.
