AMSTERDAM.- Galerie Ron Mandos is presenting Zacht, a new exhibition by Katinka Lampe, shown alongside Pip Greenaway’s solo Too Much To Swallow.

In this new body of work, Lampe allows the portrait to move into the background. Out of the light and into the shadow. Alongside this shift, she introduces paintings with multiple figures on a single canvas, exploring what happens when attention is divided and when the gaze moves beyond the spotlight.

For decades, portraiture has been the framework of Lampe’s practice. It allows her to reflect on how we look at one another, and how we ourselves are being percieved. In this new series, Lampe questions how central the portrait still needs to be within her work. Her paintings move through a process of appearance and disappearance: figures gradually emerge from the canvas, only to fade back into shadow.

Several works no longer include the human body at all. Rows of dresses, based on garments from the collection of Museum Rotterdam, speak about identity. The garments become traces of lives once lived, temporarily held and inhabited by others.

For the first time, Lampe also embraces multi-figure compositions. Where she previously avoided narrative, these new works allow for inclusion and softness. Zacht reflects on visibility and power: who is seen, who remains at the margins, and whether it is possible to look at one another without hierarchy. Rather than hardness or judgement, the exhibition proposes attentiveness, vulnerability, and softness as active positions.

Katinka Lampe traverses the realms of figurative, expressionist, and abstract painting in her soft, yet uncanny, portraits. Her works, though imbued with a sense of realism, are not meant to represent those that they depict. Resemblance is not the defining characteristic of these pieces. Instead, the artist sees the figures as visual impressions that, once transformed by her gaze, become representative of larger themes within society, rather than the individual.

Lampe often uses accessories loaded with connotation to provoke loose characterizations of theme and mood. The imposed roles played by her models, their poses, expressions, and their way of being dressed, mostly copied from magazines, the internet or old master paintings, obscure their personality and provoke deeper and subjective meaning in the minds of the viewers. Through these juxtapositions the artist explores important societal themes relating to identity, aging, color, and the ever-growing dependence on media.

Katinka Lampe is an artist based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. She received her degree from the Academy of Art and Design St. Joost in ‘s Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally in a variety of galleries, museums, and prominent art fairs such as Museum Arnhem, Arnhem,NL: Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam, NL; Singer Museum, Laren, NL, Museum Jan Cunen, Oss, NL ; Untitled Art San Francisco, USA and Untitled, Art, Miami Beach, USA. Her work is included in the collections of 21C Museum Hotels, USA; West Sun Capital Collection, Montreal,CA: Museum Arnhem, Arnhem, NL; APMA, AmorePacific Museum of Art Seoul, KR; Museum van Loon, Amsterdam, NL; C.N.A.P Centre National des Arts Plastique, Paris, FR; Museum More, Gorssel, NL; Schunck*, Heerlen, NL; Akzo Nobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam,Nl; De Nederlandsche Bank, Amsterdam, NL; ING Collection, Amsterdam, NL; Art Curial, Paris, FR; Frisseras Museum Athens, GR, and Cobra to Contemporary/The Brown Family Collection.

Katinka Lampe was born in 1963 in Tilburg, NL

She lives and works in Rotterdam, NL