Overduin & Co. is pleased to present the exhibition “Bijna Niks” by Dutch artist, Machteld Rullens. The exhibition will feature a group of new oil and resin on cardboard sculptures. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States.

Dear Andrew,

Today I helped a friend in her garden. We planted some baby zucchini, removed weeds, and ate a sandwich in between the pond and the tiny greenhouse. Afterwards we cycled to the beach and swam in the cold water. My skin still tastes salty. Tomorrow, when I return to the studio, I will see my work as if on a second, third, or 1000th date. Some work needs a new layer of resin, others need to be stored away or turned upside down.

For a while I have been thinking about a way to make a publication in which I use analogue pictures of my sculptures/wall objects in combination with pictures that I take of daily situations. I always use the flash on the camera, which makes life seem more 2d. My parents and the studio play key figures in this. I would somehow like this publication to transcend a representative form. Artists’ books imply an audience and exactly this element could create a meeting point between work and life. I would also like this book to be the result of a true collaboration between form, color, language, solitude, high, low, public and private life.

I love what color and form do to a person’s body and I like how my work finds itself in between painting and sculpture. And I <3 Kurt Schwitters, Lygia Clark, Carla Accardi, Joaquin Torres Garcia, Eva Hesse, Kai Althoff, Paul Thek, Francis Picabia, Donald Judd, ...

I enjoy the freedom that comes with abstraction or subtracting a/the core. Not adding too much, not doing too little. Keeping the work dirty and fresh at the same time. Sometimes I find it helpful to think of the work as simply evidence of an intention, a desire, or an impulse. It is perhaps so that in the private sphere I act more subconsciously. I think about art and religion a lot. Both faith and art are simultaneously and paradoxically incredibly fragile and resilient. And ultimately, indestructible.

The wind starts to blow through my apartment. I’ve opened the windows on both sides. It is going to rain soon.

(excerpt from a letter by Rullens to Andrew Berardini, who wrote the text for Full of Emptiness, Zolo Press, 2021)

Machteld Rullens (1988) lives and works in The Hague. Rullens studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. In 2019, Rullens received the Royal Award for Modern Painting in the Netherlands. Last year she was awarded a residency in Senegal by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Rullens’ work is represented by Martin van Zomeren in Amsterdam. Upcoming exhibitions will take place at Page, New York; Galeria Mascota, Mexico City; and Kunsthal Rotterdam. An artists’ book by Rullens titled, Full of Emptiness, was published by Zolo Press in 2021.