about – eliane geurts

about

Eliane Geurts is an artist from The Netherlands. Born in 1998, currently working and living in Maastricht.

The rhythm of being on the move, the emptiness that accompanies it, and the sense of space it creates, play a crucial role in her work. Cycling and walking through the surrounding landscape, she explores the lines of border areas. Her works are constructed from various materials, starting with the surface itself. Using mostly found materials, she builds a foundation in which these borderlands return as fragments, lines, and repetitions. Just as in open space, her work resists a framed canvas, instead, each piece becomes a building block within a larger whole.

In her practice, painting, drawing, writing, and photography merge. She experiments intuitively with materials and layers, attentive to calm and spatiality. Oil and acrylic, which naturally repel each other, are sometimes layered on top of one another, creating a tension for dominance. This confrontation opens up space for coincidence, resistance, and struggle, inviting the viewer to continuously question what they are seeing. Is it a landscape, or perhaps an archaeological excavation? The process of making remains visible and tangible throughout her work. She works with materials that layer over one another and partially erase each other. On the surface, these layers are often no longer visible, yet beneath the skin they form the structure of the work.

Her paintings do not function as pamphlets or vehicles for statements. Instead, she sees the calmness and immeasurable space within her abstract canvases as a form of resistance, a counter-movement within an image culture that constantly demands immediate meaning and interpretation. Ultimately, her work asks for the same physical and mental slowness that she herself seeks out on the hills surrounding the city. Geurts does not offer the viewer a ready-made answer, but a slow, sedimentary landscape in which to get lost.

Read interview Jorne Vriens