Robin Pieterse (1999) is a Dutch visual artist based in The Hague. She is currently finishing a BFA at the Royal Academy of Arts The Hague. Pieterse has exhibited across the Netherlands, with her most recent physical show at a gallery space in the KABK (2019).
With her current work, Pieterse investigates the body and its natural processes. More specifically, she questions what it means to live inside a body and explores different aspects of natural phenomena that revolve around having a physical form. Pieterse treats anatomy as an ephemeral vessel torn between opposing sensations of repulsion and attraction. Her slimy, bulky, hairy forms, which could be seen as a biological landscape, retain a marked surrealist aesthetic. Her treatment of the strange in relation to landscape connects her anatomical scenes with her earlier work. This earlier oeuvre is characterised by eerie urban scenes, which carry an atmosphere of desolation. Such scenes are also in perpetual equilibrium between opposing forces, those of violence and peace.
Pieterse’s anatomic landscapes tend to be brightly coloured and finely rendered, whereas her urban worlds are much darker and roughly painted, but both series are marked by an extraordinary depiction of light. It is often through light that she is able to convey how bodies are inhabited and how they navigate both domestic and urban spaces. This artistic exploration is particularly significant when considering ways in which people (and artists specifically) adapt their practices to their environment and make previously uninhabited spaces their own.