Spotlight Artist

Heather den Uijl

West
Artist profile photo
Featured in New American Paintings

Artist Statement

 My work utilizes the visual rhetoric found in everyday packaging for toys and junk food. I borrow and distill basic visual elements such as color, font type, and composition from these sources and merge them with processes and influences from other painting traditions such as pop art and color field painting. The work functions independently as hybrid environments where distillation, flattening, and fragmentation help them resist a sense of closure, while also creating familiarity and the promise of interpretation. Through the use of basic familiar design elements such as circles, polygons, stripes, and color relationships that feel purposeful, the work creates spaces that are carefully layered, interwoven, and suggestive of both deep illusory space and flattened graphic space.

There is an invitation to participate in the visual games of painting, familiarity, and expectation; to grapple with contemporary visual information but never be able to pinpoint its exact source. This resistance to an overarching explanation or conclusion allows the work to be openended and oblique, leaving room for interpretation, speculation, and curiosity.

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