Tag: contemporary painting

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Book ‘Why Paintings Work’

Why Paintings Work

In ‘Why Paintings Work’ Jurriaan Benschop navigates the diverse landscape of contemporary painting. He introduces the work of dozens of painters and asks: Why do these paintings work? In what ways do they speak to the viewer? He considers both the visible aspects of painting, such as the depicted motif and the application of paint, and the concepts, beliefs and motivations that underlie the canvas.

‘Why Paintings Work’ is not just about how we look at paintings, but also about finding a language that suits the art and viewing experience of today. Throughout the book different themes come up, while looking at the work of contemporary painters, such as nature, the body, touch, movement, identity, memory and spirituality.

Among the artists featured in this book are: Nikos Aslanidis, David Benforado, Louise Bonnet, Glenn Brown, Maria Capelo, Peter Doig, Béatrice Dreux, Helmut Federle, Beverly Fishman, Elisabeth Frieberg, Victoria Gitman, Veronika Hilger, Martha Jungwirth, Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, Kristi Kongi, Mark Lammert, Rezi van Lankveld, Michael Markwick, Kerry James Marshall, Lara de Moor, Matthew Metzger, Marc Mulders, Kaido Ole, Jorge Queiroz, Fiona Rae, Daniel Richter, Jessica Stockholder, Marc Trujillo, Anna Tuori, Matthias Weischer, Paula Zarina-Zemane and Gerlind Zeilner.

The book contains 284 pages with more than 100 illustrations in color, paperback 14 x 20 cm, in English. Published May 2023 by Garret Publications, Helsinki. Bookshops order through Idea books in Amsterdam *** ISBN 9789527222171 *** Individuals can order through their local (art)bookshop or online sellers. You can also order your copy through the webshop on this website.

Here are some shops where the book is available or can be ordered:

E U R O P E Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, Berlin Martin Gropius Bau, Düsseldorf K20 and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Ermoupoli Jenny up the Hill, Helsinki Suomalainen; Prisma, Manchester: Unitom, Münster: Extrabuch, Riga: Zuzeum, Stockholm, Göteborg: Adlibris

U S A Houston TX: Basket Books, Boston, MA: ICA Store, Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Artand Stories, San Diego: The Shop at MCASD

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Andreas Kassapis at Annex M

Can a good painting specifically not be a celebration of life? This question came up while I was looking at Andreas Ragnar Kassapis’s exhibition Shame is an Object in Space at Annex M in Athens. Even though the paintings are melancholic in atmosphere, that doesn’t mean they automatically pull the viewer into a similar mood. In his first institutional solo exhibition, the Athens-based artist presents more than 50 paintings (each 40 x 50 cm, the typical small-panel format he likes to work on), along with additional works such as a projected slide, collages, and text fragments. In all of the paintings, the palette is muted; there are greens, blues, yellows, and greys, but they are mostly mixed, creating an introverted, sometimes gloomy atmosphere in the city- and landscapes that are depicted. The fact that most colors are tempered creates the impression that a light haze covers the scenes, gluing them together.

Kassapis paints the city: the landscape of buildings, concrete blocks, interiors, windows, wave breakers, street corners, and so on. But his work cannot be understood as observational painting in the sense that there is a direct relationship between seeing the motif and handling the brush. In his approach, painting is rather a vessel for indirect relationships. All motifs for this exhibition were collected from the internet, from stock photos and word-to-image searches, which brings in a certain aesthetic, as well as distortions and imperfections. They have the imprint of a certain era which for the artist is interesting to work with. For the human mind, picturing a site does not really work any differently. There is not one correct representation: The memory is colored by the moment the motif was perceived, the story embedding it, the knowledge attached to it, and circumstances like the weather or time of the day.

The individual paintings are without a narrative. You could argue that they work through emptiness. By having emptied out streets or shop interiors of people, furniture, and objects, the artist has made place for third-party imagination – a stage for the spectator. The palette and the slightly tilted compositions are the way the artist has delivered his imprint. Plus, with the internet searches, a machine was involved, which also influences color and the way flatness and perspective are constructed. These layers are presented together to the viewer as a new reality, the world of painting. This is not a city. The visitor can see the works as projection panels, as psychological landscapes, and find out if the tonalities are experienced as harmonious or dissonant, as familiar or remote.

In the spacious exhibition hall, all paintings are hung at eye level, as a frieze that draws an ongoing horizontal line. Yet in between the paintings, the white spaces differ, creating rhythms within a series, breaks in the line of looking. Three main chapters are articulated, one focusing on rooms and interiors, another on the city as a double (including pairs of paintings on the same motif), and the third on the notion of home. For the last chapter, the artist zoomed in on structuress that he knows from Palio Fario, the neighborhood where he grew up close to the port of Piraeus. On the beach, there used to be constellations of heavy concrete wave breakers, for the artist a meeting place with peers, and a place of imagination.        

δεν υπήρξε ποτέ η ευκαιρία. 2023. λάδι σε ξύλο

Kassapis’s specific palette, which at first glance is not very celebratory, reminds me of walking through a village in the evening, getting used to the darkness. The longer you spent outside, the more familiar you become with the evening palette, and the more details of the houses you discover. A similar principle works here. In some paintings, bright blue appears in contrast with the tempered light, but only at the fringes, as lines and contours of shapes that define the perspective. Little color accents can be found in multiple paintings, and define how the painting as a whole comes to life. The works are full of nuance, modulations, and they have a lot to enjoy once you are tuned in to the basic mood. 

Seeing all the details and the different ways of applying and layering paint creates an alertness in looking, as each time something new comes up. It seems that this work is a celebration of life, and also of where attentive observation can lead us. But this appreciation has been hard earned, first by the artist making the work step by step, and then by the viewer unfolding the work. What is shown always remains ambivalent in nature. Nothing is a given, and nothing can be taken for granted.

Hearing the artist discuss making the works, I was struck that he spoke about mistakes in rendering a certain space, which, in an odd way, brings us back to representation – as if there is some external standard that could measure how to paint these paintings correctly. But what would that be? Maybe representation is for Kassapis an underlying structure for a painting, something he can never entirely forget no matter how many detours he makes, no matter how well he knows that it is not about painting things “correctly” from observation. It is not unlike Willem de Kooning, who, even in his most abstract works, can still make you feel that there is a figure inside. Like De Kooning, Kassapis welcomes the mistakes as things that happen and can be valuable for the painting. False can be true. A line that wants to speak for itself instead of representing the author’s intention. In temperament, however, the paintings are unlike De Kooning, more akin instead to introverted and atmospheric paintings like those of Giorgo Morandi or Édouard Vuillard. Kassapis’s work is small and modest, but serious, full of nuance, and driven by the challenge to evoke an object-image we can experience as truthful, even if each painting is just a rendering of a certain number of perspectives, an articulation leaving out many other possibilities.

Text by Jurriaan Benschop, January 2026. Exhibition from 5 November 2025 till 1 February, 2026 at Annex M, (Megaro Mousiki) in Athens.

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‘Things as They Are’

This exhibition at Jenny up the Hill on Syros spotlights the ambivalent nature of objects. Five artists draw attention to objects in their physical evidence, as they are. But surface and appearance are only the beginning. Looking at the works prompts us to question whether there is such a thing as a true nature of objects or materials.

In an era of high digital-image consumption, the artists in this exhibition invite us to regain interest in the physical qualities of the world that surrounds us. Touch and tactility are essential in connecting us with the environment and contributing to our understanding of life.

The motifs in the works of Lia Kazakou (Greece, 1980) at first seem clear and identifiable – fragments of clothing, the front view of a dress, a single sleeve, the folds around two buttons. Yet the way the artist portrays the items imbues them with ambiguity. The framing is very specific, with a “harsh” cut that highlights the abstraction of the work, the way the lines develop, or the shadows that are cast. Kazakou is based in Thessaloniki and regularly shows her work in exhibitions in Greece and Germany.

One of the paintings by Jenny Eden (United Kingdom, 1978) is called Hunebed – after the Dutch word for dolmen – as a way of suggesting a tomb-like chamber. The central area shows a ruptured space that could represent animal or human innards, a dissection opening out and tunneling backwards. Yet other ways of reading the figuration are also possible, an important quality of the painting. It never comes to rest, instead presenting a shape in motion, and it is full of contradictions in terms of psychology, being gentle and raw at once. Eden is a lecturer at the Manchester School of Art, and she is co-director of Oceans Apart, a gallery in Salford dedicated to contemporary painting.

For José Heerkens (The Netherlands, 1950), the horizontal has always been important in the composition of a painting, not just for orientation and balance, but also to evoke a sense of freedom and to create space to breathe. She is not so much interested in the illusion of depth (as through a horizon in a landscape), but rather in opening up the work to make it wide and generous. In her practice, the artist looks at how colors in different gradations or combinations work together on the surface. Heerkens works both on life-size canvases and on small-size panels like those in this exhibition. She aims to present color as purely as possible, without leading viewers to think about specific objects,figures, or landscapes. Colour: Free and Connected, an important retrospective of her work, was shown in the Kröller Müller Museum in The Netherlands in 2023.

As a painter, Paula Zarina-Zemane (Latvia, 1988) has an interest in landscape and the human figure, but at the same time, she values painting in a more abstract sense, as a play of forms and colors. The movement involved in the process of making a painting, with the speed it suggests and the depth or flatness it evokes, is part of what she wants to show. Both deliberate actions and accidents play a role. In recent years, Zarina has expanded her practice from canvas and wood panels to ceramics, further developing the oval forms we know from her paintings. Based in Riga, Zarina-Zemane has shown her works across Europe.

After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Davide Girardi decided to work some years for himself. He developed a body of work, mostly small and intimate in scale, from which two pieces are now presented for the first time in an exhibition. In Girardi’s approach collage and painting go hand in hand. He has been drawn to this method because it allows to create a tension between the destruction of an image and its reconstruction. In this process layering and depths are of high importance. The space created in his works can be read in different ways. Images like an interior or landscape are at the basis and create a sense of familiarity, yet their execution brings in an element of the unfamiliar or present a balance that is in the process of being challenged.

Things as They Are, curated by Jurriaan Benschop unfolds in two parts at Jenny up the Hill on Syros, Greece. Part 1 is on view from 18 July through 15 September, part 2 rom 18 September till 10 November, 2025.

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Waarom een schilderij werkt

boek cover Waarom een schilderij werkt

In dit boek wordt het werk van tientallen hedendaagse schilders voorgesteld. Daarbij komt steeds de vraag aan de orde: Waarom werkt dit schilderij? Op wat voor manier heeft het betekenis en kan het overtuigen? Het zijn vragen die onder meer voortkomen uit de behoefte om te kunnen navigeren in het veelvormige landschap van de schilderkunst van nu, waarin verschillende stijlen en houdingen naast en door elkaar bestaan.

Enerzijds lijkt tegenwoordig alles te kunnen, en is het aanbod van kunst groot, maar anderzijds vindt niemand echt dat alles kan. Bij kunst horen noties over wat top is en talent, over wat progressief is, kritisch of ter zake, of wat aan kracht verloren heeft. Daarbij heerst in de kunst, net als in andere domeinen, een strijd om aandacht; velen willen gezien wor- den of iets tonen, en zowel kunsteigene als afgeleide motieven spelen daarbij een rol.

Waarom een schilderij werkt gaat, behalve over de vraag hoe we naar schilderijen kijken en hoe ze werken, over de vraag hoe we over kunst schrijven en spreken. Wil taal over kunst iets betekenen, dan moet ze ermee in evenwicht zijn, niet topzwaar of overdreven, maar passend bij de kunst die aan de orde komt. Er zijn zichtbare aspecten die kunnen worden aangekaart, zoals het beeldmotief, de compositie, het kleurgebruik en de manier waarop de verf wordt aangebracht. Maar er zijn ook onzichtbare factoren: de drijfveren, het wereldbeeld, de herkomst of de visie van de kunstenaar. In dit boek worden deze aspecten onderzocht en met elkaar in verband gebracht. Het gaat om wat je ziet in schilderijen, maar ook om de houding en de ideeën die erachter liggen.

Het boek gaat in op het werk van Rezi van Lankveld, Louise Bonnet, Peter Doig, Helmut Federle, Beverly Fishman, Daniel Richer, Victoria Gitman, Martha Jungwirth, Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, Kerry James Marshall, Lara de Moor (coverbeeld), Marc Mulders, Kaido Ole, Paula Rego, Jessica Stockholder, Anna Tuori, Matthias Weischer en vele anderen.

Waarom een schilderij werkt is verschenen bij uitgeverij van Oorschot Het boek kost 25 euro en is verkrijgbaar in Nederlandse en Vlaamse boekwinkels, bijvoorbeeld bij Copyright in Gent, Boekhandel Robert Premsela in Amsterdam, Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, Kunstmuseum Den Haag en Broese in Utrecht. Het kan ook hier via deze website besteld worden.

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The Nature of Abstraction

exhibition beyond the line with works by sean scully and stefan gierowski

An exhibition in Warsaw brings together the work of Sean Scully and Stefan Gierowski.

In 1945, the year that Sean Scully was born in Dublin, Stefan Gierowski, aged 20, enrolled at the art academy in Krakow, making his first steps into the arts. In the subsequent years, he navigated stylistic possibilities, looking with interest at avant-garde art movements from the West, but also facing the demands as phrased by the communist regime in post-war Poland. Art should be for the people, an idea that Gierowski would not disagree with per se, but how it should look was another question.


Scully and Gierowski grew up in different contexts in western and eastern Europe (Scully also went to the US, which influenced his painting), but as their respective artistic lives developed, both came to embrace abstract painting. They never met in person, but a recent exhibition at the Fundacja Stefana Gierowskiego in Warsaw brought the works of the two together, creating a dialogue (posthumously, for Gierowski) Beyond the line, as the title of the show indicated. It turned out to be an exhibition that made you think about the nature of abstraction and how it can relate to our present lives.


Curator Joachim Pissaro speaks in his introduction about the abstract movement, but one might wonder if it is a movement (or style) at all. Painters may use the same type of geometric forms, squares, lines, or color bands, yet works can have different motivations and impacts. In the case of Scully and Gierowski, there are such shared formal interests as the line and its widening to a band or other shape. They both also work with just a handful of elements to make a painting. But the temperaments underneath, and how the forms come out and take life on the surface, seem quite different. If two people wear the same type of coat, it does not mean they will look alike.


Scully has noted that an abstract painting cannot really be for or against something. One cannot appropriate an abstract painting to illustrate something based on subject matter or narrative. For Gierowski this must have been a critical advantage, as it created distance to the official socialist realist style that the political establishment in Poland identified with. The painting spoke in other ways – through surface, paint application, color, light, and sense of balance. But maybe even more importantly, art for him was about something you cannot really grab, an abstract quality in the sense of “not tangible.”


The absence of what can be named or identified has made abstract painting suitable for spiritual or mystical readings. Just as in religion, where the essence, or God, cannot be depicted, the very essence of an abstract painting cannot be extracted. It resides within the painting. That is, if it works at all. This does not mean that abstract painting leans automatically towards the spiritual. It seems to be a matter of where the artist directs his attention. A work can also be focused on optics and perception, or it can present a structural model aimed at understanding the world through the metaphor of forces at play. Throughout the exhibition, such options present themselves, activating the question in what capacity does a painting work, and also, when exactly does it come alive. The answers keep changing.


For Scully, as Pissaro describes in the catalog, art was a respite from early on, offering beauty and calm in a turbulent, poor, and streetlife reality. When Scully attended school, the encounter with art presented an escape in the best sense of the word, a way out of trouble, offering moments of recuperation and hope for something else. This interest developed and manifested later on in Scully’s work, for instance in the chapel he decorated for the Hortensia Herrero collection in Valencia, a sacred space with a combination of paintings, glass, color, and light. This aspect of Scully’s work is certainly not the only one – the artist is also earthbound, relating to the color and shapes of a building or of landscapes, enjoying the physical existence and structures he observes, as can be sensed in works such as Taped Painting Cream and Black (1975), where strips of tape create a woven pattern on the surface, and Grey Wall (2019), which suggests a stacking of stones or otherwise constructive elements. Scully’s paintings seem to be the result of working through complexities to attain a sense of order and simplicity, and this feels like an important part of what the artist has to offer. He has cleared things up.


In Gierowski’s case, it seems that part of the work starts from an interest in how color relations work out, how they might or might not create the illusion of space, or evoke a certain lightness. More than Scully, Gierowski stretches his palette from the deepest dark to the very bright, including some loud and cheeky colors. Seeing the works he made over a half a century, it struck me how fresh and crisp some of them look, like Painting DCCXXVIII (1998), for example, while others appear more dated, or belong to what was “going around” at the time Gierowski made them. There are quite a few cases where he transcends his time, which gives his work great appeal. Abstraction, it seems, offered him a ticket outside his time and cultural context, and also across borders, even if he did not have much possibility to travel.


Gierowski appears to have been an analytical and cautious painter who carefully studied modern movements such as Futurism and Surrealism, taking what fit his interests in how to create movement with only abstract forms, or how to create space through color contrasts. There is a lot of attention in the handwork, the brushstroke, the treatment of surfaces, and the construction of the painting. Yet all that seems to happen with the objective of making paintings that at some point forget all about their physical existence and take off, so to speak, getting wings and becoming metaphysical reflections.


The different temperaments of the painters come out when you focus on how differently the light shines in their works, Scully’s more muted and melancholic, and staying closer to natural colors, Gierowski’s looking for the whole spectrum. In terms of brushstroke and speed, on the other hand, Scully has more bravado and brings in grand gestures. Both painters created a discipline that works with a set of formal limitations (which is one aspect of their abstraction), within which they expand, finding freedom and infinity. Scully often works in series, exhausting a certain motif through repetition, whereas Gierowski was less inclined to series but committed to making a different painting with just a little shift in approach, changing only one of the parameters.


Paradoxically, in the end it does not matter that much if the paintings of the two artists look similar in terms of composition, or if they use the same shapes. It is not at that level where they merge in the mind or experience of the viewer. It turns out that the abstraction is a quality situated inside the work, more so than being an outer identifier. It is something that might make the painting shine, or transmit a feeling of unity, or lift the spirit; it cannot really be fixed or pointed at. And it is not something that comes out successfully in every painting; it has to be conquered or met with by the artist. The real mystery is when an abstract painting transcends its formal appearance, and appears relevant to life. The whole universe might be in there, and yet you cannot prove one thing.

This text was first published on Arterritory on 28 November 2024.

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Tamuna Sirbiladze in Vienna

Tamuna Sirbiladze painting at Belvedere 21 in Vienna

Eight years after her death, the Belvedere 21 in Vienna is organizing a retrospective of Tamuna Sirbiladze, an artist who grew up and attended the academy in Tbilisi, Georgia, and came to Vienna in 1997 for further study, where she subsequently stayed. Sirbiladze died at the age of 45 from cancer, a biographical fact that is hard to ignore when visiting the exhibition, especially toward the end, where the work from her later years is displayed, created as an ode to her young children and also to a childlike way of drawing or painting. The works made with oil pastels are partly abstract but also depict natural motifs such as the pomegranate, a symbol referencing her homeland. The works were created with the awareness of her approaching death, a fact that is hard to forget.

However, the late works represent just one facet of an oeuvre that showcases various approaches to painting. In the preceding rooms, a series of works can be seen in which the artist enters into dialogue with historical painters she found interesting, such as Velázquez or Caravaggio, thus exercising her stylistic mobility. Earlier, she had engaged in dialogue with the work of Martin Kippenberger and Andy Warhol. There is a curiosity in the way Sirbiladze approaches and tries everything. Although not every result is equally interesting or unique, it comes across as authentic artistic exploration.

The works where Sirbiladze is most explicit and found her own voice were created between 2005 and 2009. By then, she had freed herself from (Soviet) conventions she grew up with, had gone through a period of experimenting with digital media, and returned to painting human figures, particularly women. At this point, she seems to hit her stride and make a breakthrough, reclaiming the female body from the male-dominated art history. In terms of content, she has a strong driving force: she determines how the woman is depicted. The works are quickly made, energetic, and bold. The titles sometimes indicate what they are about, such as Kotzen (2005), Suicide Painting (2007), and My Rapist (2006). In Unter den roten Sternen/Cubic Rubic (Communist) (2005), a woman is depicted sitting on a toilet. These are scenes where, in real life, the door would be locked, but here, transformed into the domain of painting, the door is opened. The artist succeeds in painting all of this without it necessarily coming across as provocation. The play of color and line gives the scenes a dynamic and lively effect. At the same time, the work contains a dimension of realism in the sense of: this is how it is, this is a woman’s body, or part of life as she perceived it, and that gives the work an almost factual persuasive power. During this period, Sirbiladze is stylistically free, and her work does not directly remind one of others.

The exhibition is titled Not Cool but Compelling, named after a 2011 drawing, which is an apt title for the artist’s attitude. Or at least, the exhibition presents an oeuvre that does not try to be cool but emerges from urgency and shifting interests. The fact that it sometimes becomes cool nonetheless is partly due to the current momentum, with attention to female perspectives and imagination. Just before her death, the artist had her first solo gallery show in New York, which could have been a breakthrough to a broader audience. That moment has now arrived in her adopted homeland of Austria, albeit posthumously.

The exhibition is curated by Sergey Harutoonian for Belverdere 21 in Vienna and is on view till 11 August 2024

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Lia Kazakou in Thessaloniki

Lia Kazakou, Untitled, 2024, detail

It has been eight years since Lia Kazakou presented a solo exhibition in her hometown of Thessaloniki. While her choice of motifs has largely remained the same – fragments of clothing, the front view of a dress, a single sleeve, the folds around a zipper – something has changed in the way she portrays them, imbuing the motifs with greater ambiguity. This development can be seen in the current exhibition titled Μύχια Ύλη, which could be translated as Innermost Matter. 

In a large work at the entrance (all works Untitled, 2023-24), a range of greens, from shiny pale to matte dark, coexist within a single canvas depicting a coat with a waistband, slightly opened. In a smaller work, a deep blue with dark shadows, light creating the impression of a film fragment. The fabric in the 15 paintings in the show is opulent, rich texture depicted in detail, with folds and the interplay of light and shadow. As the clothing is often portrayed close up, the viewer is denied the full picture or the appearance of the figure wearing the garment, with only a strip of skin hinting at their presence.

Throughout the exhibition, the motifs easily transition from their figurative origins into abstraction, from identifiable objects into patterns of parallel lines or gradations of colors. What initially seems like soft fabric may simultaneously evoke the touch of harder materials such as bone, wood, or metal. This material flexibility appears to stem from Kazakou’s increased freedom and confidence in handling her subject matter. Over the years, her motifs have gained intensity in color, accompanied by a heightened sense of plasticity. The motifs appear not just as garments, but as matter with an essence.

Innermost Matter is on view till 11 May, 2024 at Donopoulos IFA , 3 Agias Theodoras in Thessaloniki. The image shows a detail of Untitled, 2024, oil on linen, 110 x 70 cm.

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Edition Lara de Moor

In 2023 Lara de Moor produced a special edition, based on an earlier painting she had made: ‘Spiller.’ The edition was first presented at the group exhibition Wo man sich trifft at the Emsdettener Kunstverein in Germany. The print is for sale through this website.

The edition is a fine art (piezo) print on Hahnemühle paper. Each sheet has been individually treated with black ink. As a consequence, in each print the dripping paint ‘enters the room’ in a different way, making it a unique art work.

The price of one print is 500 euro (shipping costs excluded). Pick up without shipping costs can be arranged in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin and Athens.

‘Spiller’ (2020) was used as the cover image for the Dutch edition of Why Paintings Work (Waarom een schilderij werkt). The work of De Moor is featured in this book among the work of circa 40 other contemporary painters. For further information, send us an e-mail: info (at) jurriaanbenschop (dot) com. You can order the edition through the contact page on this website

Spiller (2023), black ink on fine art print on Hahnemüller paper, 29,7 x 42 cm each, edition of 60 + AP, signed and numbered.

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Press about ‘Why Paintings Work’

Why Paintings Work in English and Dutch

“He practices an ’embedded’ art criticism,” Daniel Rovers wrote in De Witte Raaf about Why Paintings Work. “He (Benschop) did the same in his previous book, Salt in the wound. Artists in Europe. (2016), but then he covered multiple visual genres. The restriction to painting pays off this time.” Below you find excerpts from De Witte Raaf and other book reviews of Why Paintings Work. The fragments are translated into English. To read the original texts in Dutch, scroll down.

Daniël Rovers, “Why a Painting Works,” pulished in De Witte Raaf, Nov-Dec 2023:

“Benschop simply wants to facilitate a conversation about contemporary painting, especially in a time when, formally speaking, almost anything seems possible, while, morally, strict norms are sometimes imposed on the question of who can depict what. He does this in a language that, as he writes himself, is ‘not top-heavy or exaggerated,’ but ‘suitable for the art at hand.'”

“No one claimed at the entrance of the museum that everything about an artwork should be clear just by looking, he dryly states in his introduction. In that one sentence, the style and attitude of the author are encapsulated. Here is a modest, attentive enthusiast who listens well, especially to artists, and much less to critics or art historians. There is understatement in his sentences, which are clear and self-explanatory, rarely extending beyond what the content allows.”

“Why Painting Works is lucid and concrete, yet also conceptual in nature. It presents an unforeseen, unimaginable series of perspectives, techniques, and approaches, of which, as a reader, contrary to what the title suggests, you do not know if they work, because you only see the color images on the pages, something entirely different from three-dimensional canvases. Benschop succeeds in arousing the desire to see them in real life. In that sense, this book, of which an English version has been published by Garret Publications, is a catalog – three hundred pages of text and about seventy images – of a future exhibition, should a museum director grant him the favor of the necessary galleries.”

Maarten Buser, ‘Tastend kijken en dan terugpraten’ in literary magazine Liter, December 5, 2022. Review in the form of an open letter:

“Anyone expecting a specific (viewing) method based on the title ‘Why Painting Works’ will be disappointed. That operation – the ‘mechanism’ by which the painting convinces and makes you want to keep looking – varies per chapter. For example, when Kaido Ole, in a comic-like manner, opposes overly expressive painting, his art works differently than that of Beverly Fishman, who, with the visual language of minimalist abstraction, says something essential about marketing and the pharmaceutical industry. Each artist must be approached differently, and even after a sharp formal analysis, there may be enough uncertainty in the interpretation. In all those attempts, you seem to be as much a mechanic as a mystic.”

“Even when words may fall short to capture something that is better expressed in an image, they can guide your gaze. In that sense, writing – or more broadly, speaking – can help to get a better grip on art without completely dispelling the mystery. Why Painting Works is a skillful demonstration of this.”

Karel Alleene, ‘Waarom een schilderij werkt,’ on Cutting Edge (online), December 20, 2022:

“Jurriaan Benschop (1963) writes relatively concise essay collections about art. Similar authors are Bernard Dewulf, Roland Jooris, or Hans den Hartog Jager. Writers who, averse to quick sentiments, embark on a quest to provide personal meaning to a painting. In doing so, they steer clear of aesthetic terms that often transform art essays into enigmatic texts.”

Benschop’s pointed and pertinent writing style ensures that you frequently underline sentences with a pencil. Because you know that this is the kind of book you will refer to frequently. We place ‘Why Paintings Work’ alongside Bernard Dewulf’s Bijlichtingen (2001) and Roland Jooris’ Geschilderd of geschreven (1992). Small essay collections that make the reader eager to view the described works in a museum.”

You can order the book in your local art book store or through this website by filling out the order form HERE Delivery time in Europe is about one week, outside Europe two weeks approximately.

T E X T S in D U T C H

Daniël Rovers, “Waarom een schilderij werkt,” in De Witte Raaf, Nov-Dec 2023.

“Benschop wil simpelweg een gesprek over hedendaagse schilderkunst mogelijk maken, juist in een tijd waarin formeel gezien zo goed als alles mogelijk lijkt, terwijl in moreel opzicht – de vraag wie wat mag afbeelden – soms strenge normen worden opgelegd. Dat doet hij in een taal die, zoals hij zelf schrijft, ‘niet topzwaar of overdreven’ is, ‘maar passend bij de kunst die aan de orde komt’.”

“‘Hier is een bescheiden, attente liefhebber aan het woord, die goed luistert, vooral naar kunstenaars, en veel minder naar critici of kunsthistorici. Er zit understatement in zijn zinnen, die helder zijn en voor zich spreken, en zich zelden breder maken dan de inhoud toelaat.”

“Hij bedrijft een ‘ingebedde’ kunstkritiek. Dat deed hij ook in zijn vorige boek, Zout in de wond. Kunstenaars in Europa (2016), maar toen bestreek hij meerdere beeldende genres. De beperking tot de schilderkunst werpt dit keer haar vruchten af.”

“Waarom een schilderij werkt is lucide en concreet, en toch ook conceptueel van aard. Het presenteert een onvoorziene, onvoorstelbare reeks van invalshoeken, technieken en benaderingen, waarvan je als lezer – wat de titel ook mag beweren – nu juist níét weet of ze werken, omdat je op de pagina’s slechts de kleurenafbeeldingen ziet, wat iets volkomen anders is dan driedimensionale doeken. Benschop slaagt erin het verlangen te wekken ze in het echt te willen zien. In die zin is dit boek, waarvan een Engelstalige versie door Garret Publications is uitgegeven, een catalogus – driehonderd pagina’s tekst en een zeventigtal afbeeldingen – van een toekomstige tentoonstelling, mocht een hem genegen museumdirecteur de tentoonstellingsmaker de nodige zalen gunnen.”

Maarten Buser ‘Tastend kijken en dan terugpraten’ in literatir tijdschrift Liter, 5 december 2022. Recensie in de vorm van een open brief

“Wie op basis van de titel Waarom een schilderij werkt een bepaalde (kijk)methode verwacht, komt bedrogen uit. Die werking – het ‘mechanisme’ waardoor het schilderij overtuigt en waardoor je ernaar wil blijven kijken – verschilt per hoofdstuk. Wanneer bijvoorbeeld Kaido Ole zich op het stripachtige afzet tegen al te expressieve schilderkunst, werkt zijn kunst immers anders dan die van Beverly Fishman, die met de beeldtaal van minimalistische abstractie iets wezenlijks zegt over marketing en de medicijnindustrie. Elke kunstenaar moet op een andere manier benaderd worden en zelfs na een scherpe formele analyse kan er genoeg onzeker blijken in de interpretatie. U lijkt me in al die pogingen evenzeer een monteur als een mysticus.”

“Ook als woorden tekort kunnen schieten om iets te vangen dat beter in beeld uitgedrukt kan worden, kunnen ze je blik bijsturen. In die zin kan het schrijven – of breder: het spreken – helpen om toch wat meer grip te krijgen op kunst, zonder het mysterie geheel te laten verdwijnen. Waarom een schilderij werkt is daar een knappe demonstratie van.”Ook als woorden tekort kunnen schieten om iets te vangen dat beter in beeld uitgedrukt kan worden, kunnen ze je blik bijsturen. In die zin kan het schrijven – of breder: het spreken – helpen om toch wat meer grip te krijgen op kunst, zonder het mysterie geheel te laten verdwijnen. Waarom een schilderij werkt is daar een knappe demonstratie van.”

Karel Alleene, ‘Waarom een schilderij werkt,’ gepubliceerd op Cutting Edge (online), December 20, 2022:

“Jurriaan Benschop (1963) schrijft relatief beknopte essaybundels over kunst. Soortgenoten zijn Bernard Dewulf, Roland Jooris of Hans den Hartog Jager. Schrijvers die wars van snelle sentimenten een zoektocht aanvatten om een persoonlijke betekenis te verschaffen aan een schilderij. Daarbij blijven ze weg van esthetische termen die geregeld kunstessays transformeren in enigmatische teksten.”

“Benschops puntige en pertinente schrijfstijl zorgt ervoor dat je veelvuldig zinnen aanstreept met potlood. Omdat je weet dat dit het soort boek is waar je veelvuldig naar terug zal grijpen. We plaatsen ‘Waarom een schilderij werkt’ naast Bernard Dewulfs ‘Bijlichtingen’ (’01) en Roland Jooris’ ‘Geschilderd of geschreven’ (’92). Kleine essaybundels die de lezer zin doen krijgen de beschreven werken te bekijken in een museum.”

Waarom een schilderij werkt kan in elke Nederlandse of Vlaamse boekhandel besteld worden. Wilt u het boek via de post ontvangen, dan kunt u ook via deze website bestellen op deze pagina.

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Where We Meet

Exhibition view 'Wo man sich trifft' international painting show at the Emsdettener Kunstverein

Starting from the conception of a painting as a place to meet, different approaches can be observed in this international group exhibition. The show looks into the various ways that contemporary painters stage encounters, be it imaginary or with an abstract other. While some of the works guide the spectator’s imagination by delivering a figurative scene or by creating an interior with meaningful objects, others retreat into an exclusive, painterly world, where forms seem to float freely, or where there is no clear sense of perspective but merely the immediate impact of color, surface, and shape instead. The different ways the artists create and handle pictorial space is an extension of their conceptions of what a painting should be or present, and how it anticipates the presence of the other.

Participating artists: Matthias Weischer, Lara de Moor, Rezi van Lankveld, Kiki Kolympari, David Benforado, Erwin Bohatsch, and Caitlin Lonegan. 3 Sept- 15 Oct, 2023 at the Emsdettener Kunstverein, Emsdetten, Germany.