We are very proud to announce Rob Birza’s first solo exhibition at Martin van Zomeren.

To this day I can still vividly remember encountering his work for the first time during his solo-exhibitions in De Stedelijk Museum (Birza, 1991) and Het Haags Gemeente Museum (The Aquarium, 1991), which made a lasting impression on me. Rob Birza belongs to a generation of artists with postmodern taste and an anarchistic aesthetic attitude. It felt like he freed painting from the shackles of rigid conceptualism that seemed to dominate the art discourse in the Netherlands at the time. As a young student, I visited these exhibitions several times and still cherish the memory and catalogue that accompanied the exhibition at De Stedelijk Museum.

In his solo-exhibition at Martin van Zomeren, we will present recent paintings from his ongoing series Fake Flowers. Immanent in these paintings is still the same liberating energy and intelligent playfulness that impressed me so much back in the day. Like then, he still paints in egg tempera, a medium that was almost completely forgotten in contemporary painting at the time. This paint gives a subtle raw and flattish surface while at the same time allowing light and brightness to permeate.

The imagery in the Fake Flowers series consists of a combination of rather kitschy thrift store vases, rigidly filled with flowers, set against a backdrop of illuminated aquaria, terraria, refrigerators, and birdcages. These objects are depicted in impossible geometric shapes which gives it an eerie, theatrical effect. Between these layers of thrift store flower vases and illuminated, distorted spaces, looming from behind, it teems with crawling and swimming creatures like rats, salamanders, tropical fish, sea horses and other small grotesquely painted animals. The paintings are full of paradoxes: the real becomes unreal, kitsch blends into beauty, and the sublime turns banal.

Rob Birza (Geldrop, the Netherlands, 1962)
studied at the St. Joost Academy in Breda and subsequently at De Ateliers 63 in Haarlem.
He works in painting, sculpture, ceramics and installations.

In 1998 Rob Birza won the prestigious Sandberg Prize (Oeuvre Award). His work has been shown extensively in numerous solo exhibitions at institutions such as Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), SMAK (Gent), Haags Gemeente Museum (Den Haag), De Vleeshal (Middelburg), De Pont Museum (Tilburg), and Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem (Arnhem). He has had solo exhibitions at galleries such as Wim van Krimpen, Nouvelle Images, Giorgio Persano and in recent years at Willem Baars Projects in Amsterdam.
His work has been included in numerous museums, corporate and private collections in the Netherlands and abroad.

Rob Birza is now co-represented by Willem Baars Projects and Martin van Zomeren.