Nout Schoonhoven

2025

Nout Schoonhoven works with image reconstruction and transformation, to reflect on the impermanent nature of time and memory. Combining painting, photography, and assemblage, he forms large canvas tapestries which he sees as living, shifting terrains. His recent self-portraits tie into these notions, although not in a necessarily traditional sense. Using sunlight sensitive photo transfers, his portraits slowly dissolve back into the canvas on which they are adhered. What remains is not a fixed image, but something that transforms. He uses the self-portrait to question what it means to be present without being fully visible or defined. The idea of portraying the self becomes less about declaring personality, and more about acknowledging the ongoing, temporal nature of change. This resistance to fixity is both poetic and political. In a culture preoccupied with visibility, coherence, and legibility, Schoonhoven’s work offers a counter-act. One that embraces ambiguity, misrecognition, and change. What does it mean to be present, but not fixed? To be seen, but not defined?

Artist statement
Challenging painterly tradition, Nout Schoonhoven reconstructs and transforms imagery to touch upon themes of change and impermanence. What emerges is not a fixed image, but a shifting terrain. The work attempts to make visible the lingering, changing nature of time, and how this affects our perception of memory and of the materials we surround ourselves with. Between gesture and residue, a language forms and disappears, over and over again.

This page was last updated on July 7, 2025