BIOGRAPHY

Born in Gouda, The Netherlands in 1972, and raised in Voorburg, Evenblij studied architectural design at the Utrecht School of Arts (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht, HKU) with the intention of developing large, outdoor spaces. Drawing the plans appealed to her more than their ultimate execution, however, compelling her to study drawing for one year at Wackers Academy in Amsterdam before returning to HKU to study painting, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1998. In her early years as a painter, Evenblij made monumental, abstract expressionist paintings with bold, rectilinear strokes of black and white paint on canvas. With her early minimalist toolbox which combined the distinct American expressionisms of Franz Kline, Pollock, and De Kooning with the geometric abstractions of Malevich and Mondrian, Evenblij sought to explore depth through light and composition, adding as little color as possible. “I wasn’t very interested in color,” said the artist. “I find it quieter [without it].”

In 2002, Evenblij moved with her partner and two-month-old daughter to Delhi, India, leaving her spacious studios in Amsterdam behind. “In Delhi I had this little studio where I was working. I started having these nightmares with big canvases, that I had to carry them for the rest of my life,” recalled Evenblij. Realizing the scale of her prior works was largely dependent on the space available to her, Evenblij decided to alter course. She began photographing her new surroundings, and her exploration of this new medium culminated in Home|life, a 2004/5 exhibition of photos taken by 121 homeless children around the globe, organized together with photographer Amit Khullar and the Salaam Baalak Trust. The final photographs were carefully selected first by the Baalak Trust, then by Evenblij and Khullar, from more than 15,000 photographic submissions, and exhibited in light boxes outside the Visual Arts Gallery in New Delhi.

The project inaugurated a period of absorption and environmental discovery for Evenblij. That same year she gave birth to her second child and moved to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where she quickly found a home among other artists. Although Evenblij had given up her large canvases, through all her mediatic morphisms, she remained a painter at heart. In 2006 she held a solo exhibition at Java Gallery entitled Heureux ici, pourquoi partir? (Happy here, why leave?) In which the entire exhibition space became her canvas for exploring the fluctuations and changes occurring within the gallery and herself. For one month the composition, comprising small added and removed canvases splashed in forceful swathes of black paint, and walls and floors drawn or painted upon, was in a constant state of flux.

In the same location one year later, she organized an exhibition, titled Anon, featuring thirty Cambodian artists from local art academies. At Java Gallery, Evenblij sought to bring them into closer contact with the international contemporary art world. “I split the room into thirty parts, and gave one to each artist to create and exhibit their work.” The space was open 24 hours a day for both artists and visitors alike, during which time Evenblij provided the artists with courses of instruction. “The one rule I had was that the sculptor could not make sculptures, and the painter could not make paintings, in order to let them think in different ways.” Participating artists included Heng Ravuth, Lim Sokchanlina, and Khvay Samnung, a contributor to documenta 14. The title, a Cambodian word describing the symbol for infinity, was chosen to “represent the eternal process of artistic creation – no end and no beginning.”

The same year, Evenblij was invited to exhibit her work at The Art Lounge at Hotel de la Paix in Siem Reap. Inviting three other artists to exhibit along side her, she entitled the show Lines & Lost Lines. Following the dictum she gave to the exhibiting artists in Anon, in Lines & Lost Lines Evenblij made boundless installation drawings using every material on hand – from tape to a kilometer of dental floss – except a pen or brush. In addition to the frenetically-free and experimental paintings of Albert Oehlen, Evenblij has cited the installation paintings of Katharina Grosse and Sarah Sze as points of reference for her own installation works. Where the works of Grosse slide or perambulate along surfaces, and the creations of Sze kaleidoscope through space, Evenblij’s own journey through the boundaries of space and medium conveys a gripping determination to penetrate or break through her surroundings, a single-mindedness that seeks not horizontal expansion, but vertical depth.

This urge followed Evenblij to Amsterdam when she returned in 2009. Separated and with two children to raise on her own, Evenblij found herself far away from the constant motion, collaboration and change her work had grown out of for the past seven years. Again, she began photographing her surroundings. When her children were old enough to attend school, she discovered a six-meter long, double-sided graffiti wall in an adjacent skate park. Open to professionals and amateurs alike, the graffiti wall went through radical upheavals at least three times a week. “If you draw, you do everything yourself, and you’re completely in control. But when I came to the wall, I used to stand there and think, what do I do with this?”

As she had in Cambodia and Delhi, before the wall Evenblij had to relinquish control. She began photographing the wall with her cellphone: producing “snapshots”, as she calls them, two hours a day, four days a week, for seven years. The snapshots she took during this time, numbering in the thousands, were taken up-close, such that the flat, artificially-colored surface ruptures into mountain ridges and valleys, lakes and skies, formed by new layers of paint and old ones peeling or breaking off through wind, rain, or the restless hands of children. “For me, the wall was always about finding space and depth,” said Evenblij. She also took hundreds of wall fragments back to her studio, which she saw as “paintings in themselves”: their torn edges, serpentine lines, and blended textures resembled her drawings, and she began positioning the fragments on top of her drawings to be photographed together. In 2020 she selected series of photographs to be included in a book entitled Borrowed Spaces. The name was an adaptation of something a fellow draughtsman had observed: “you create the drawings, but they’re made from borrowed images.”

But still she had not yet entirely excavated the wall. Together with her partner, former medical researcher and IT specialist Albert de Roos, she contracted her snapshot selection further by singling out series of photographs of the wall or the wall in combination with her drawings — sometimes dozens, sometimes hundreds — to be put through an AI program. De Roos had created a “generative adversarial network” which, through artificial intelligence, learns to generate new images which resemble the input images. “When I select, I still secretly continue making selections within the selections,” Evenblij explained. “So it’s not a confirmation of what has already come out, but a step towards the creation of new things.” Relinquishing her selections to AI was a step into the unknown, or seemed to be, until Evenblij studied the generated images. “You see how the form changes, and how it’s searching for my image. And that reminds me very much of my own painting process. Earlier, when I painted and I felt that it still wasn’t right, instead of painting over it I would start painting again alongside of it, painting one work after the other until it felt right. What the AI does, is my own process, but then ten or a hundred times faster, with more varied outcomes.”

In the AI’s quest to replicate the jagged contours and stark contrasts of Evenblij’s snapshots, lines are often blurred, or lost altogether. Vivid or opaque colors soften into translucent and cool tones. Textures of cement and old paint are aqueously blended, culminating in an experience of depth one might find staring at the surface of a clear sea, rocks meters beneath feeling just out of reach. Often serialized with the title Lines & Lost Lines, these works reenter Evenblij’s pursuit of freedom through depth by being drawn upon by hand and reinserted for the AI’s consideration, producing a new series in a limitless expanse of space resulting from an obsessive, enduring investigation of detail.

Gunther Förg, whose monumental, architectural minimalism has influenced Evenblij’s late work, once said of abstract art, “for me, abstract art today is what one sees and nothing more.”  If Förg’s definition could have been applied to Evenblij’s earlier artistic quests for depth through composition and form, Borrowed Spaces seems to transcend it, by surrendering what one sees to being lost. In so doing, Evenblij has discovered the space within the space, and opened it to infinite possibilities, with neither beginning nor end.