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This year marks the tenth edition of the NN Art Award. The annual incentive prize of €10,000 is awarded to a talented artist who completed their education in the Netherlands and presents work at Art Rotterdam (27–29 March at Rotterdam Ahoy). The professional jury nominated four artists: Fiona Lutjenhuis (Galerie Fleur & Wouter), Tina Farifteh (Gallery Vriend van Bavink), Mandy Franca (Night Café Gallery) and Kyra Nijskens (Prospects / Mondriaan Fonds). From 14 March to 25 May 2026, work by all nominees will be on view at Kunsthal Rotterdam.
Fiona Lutjenhuis’s youth was shaped by an exceptional context: she grew up in the Malva sect, a religious community in a village in Brabant, which she left behind at the age of sixteen. This closed sect drew on an eclectic mix of theosophy, esoteric cosmology, secret societies and beliefs surrounding supernatural and extraterrestrial life. Lutjenhuis translates this ideological legacy and her personal memories into a hybrid visual language, enriched by archival research. Her work is not a literal reconstruction, but rather a symbolic and poetic retelling, often infused with humour, as a way of getting some grip on her past. The resulting works frequently combine playful and grim elements. For Lutjenhuis, her practice is a way of reinterpreting her exceptional childhood without attaching judgement to it. She approaches the world from a rational, autonomous and agnostic worldview, while at the same time retaining a spiritual curiosity about could might possibly exist.
At Kunsthal Rotterdam, Lutjenhuis presents, for example, two large folding screens titled “I Flourish Into Chaos” (2024). On the panels, the leaders of the sect appear as birds of prey: owls and a hawk. Floating buildings with seemingly transparent walls depict scenes from her family history, in which people are rendered as static Japanese kokeshi dolls. This visual language is not a coincidence: the Malva sect regularly appropriated elements from different religious and cultural traditions. The all-seeing eye that recurs on the screens refers to Geza-4, the planet that is regarded within the sect as the ultimate place of refuge.
The artist often creates works that evoke a sense of domestic shelter, including a birdhouse and a painted light-blue bed construction with the telling title “Family Trip”. In that work, the bed frame is transformed into a sandbox with small sandcastles, causing the piece of furniture to lose its domestic function and literally turn into a charged landscape. Lutjenhuis’s oeuvre is populated by human, animal and extraterrestrial figures and engages with themes such as belief, power and submission.
Fiona Lutjenhuis was born in Zevenaar in 1991. She studied at the ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem and subsequently took part in the residency programme at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Her work was previously shown at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Het Noordbrabants Museum, 1646, the Dordrechts Museum, Schiphol Airport, the H3H Biennale and Drawing Centre Diepenheim. It is held in the collections of, among others, the AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Museum Helmond and SCHUNCK Glaspaleis.
Fiona, could you tell us more about the work you are presenting at Art Rotterdam and at Kunsthal Rotterdam?
The work I am showing at Art Rotterdam is an installation with a combination piece of furniture as a bed, with a mosquito net, paintings, sculptures and soft toys. For this presentation, I deliberately chose a setting in which I feel safest and where I can retreat for a moment, even at an art fair. The imagery in the paintings is based on dreams that have stayed with me: a world between sleeping and waking, a place where I like to be and where rules can be distorted. Once I wake up, I am often disappointed that everything is once again governed by social, political and natural rules. Despite the fact that I have many nightmares, I also love sleeping, because the world then feels more fluid, as a form of escape. Three paintings are presented in which dreams are depicted.
For Kunsthal Rotterdam, I have two folding screens in mind, which together form the work “I Flourish Into Chaos” (2024). I made these two screens based on the ten entities from other planets that were central to my parents’ religious beliefs. The entity that was discussed most was Master Ankhmania. The masters, also known as the guardians, are depicted on the reverse side as conical forms.
Within the screens unfolds a pine forest populated by birds, including birds of prey and an owl. Notably, the owl is not counted among the birds of prey. The birds stand for the entities believed to inhabit birds. They hold us like dolls. The dolls in the floating houses represent metaphorical scenarios from our household. For me, the combination of birds and dolls conveys the feeling that I was protected, but at the same time also controlled. Out of fear of the unknown, I hoped that the entities from other planets would look like birds.
The eastern influences that often recur in my work have a clear origin. As a child, I was convinced that my previous life had taken place somewhere in Asia. My father affirmed that idea: he believed he had lived in Scotland in a previous life and my mother in France or Spain, where she was labelled a witch. Absurd, of course, but within my childhood imagination and the context in which I grew up, this felt entirely normal.
In addition, I have a strong preference for Japanese, South Korean, Thai and Chinese design. What appeals to me, for example, is that in South Korea, art and design are not separated. I believe that’s a realistic way of looking at culture: as a whole in which belief, art and daily life are interconnected. For the folding screens, I also looked at their origins. They travelled from China to Europe and gradually became westernised there. Both works contain quite intimate references to my own worlds and those of my parents and the religious sect. By presenting these references in a playful, childlike way, I hope to soothe myself and make the whole more bearable.
What are your plans for 2026?
This year, I started compiling drawings, together with publisher Terry Bleu. That book will be published in March. In addition, I am working on two presentations abroad, although unfortunately I cannot share anything about those just yet.
I am also busy ticking off everything I still want to do. It think it’s important to realise the work I truly want to make, without later regretting that I never did it. To that end, I collaborate a lot with other artists and makers, combining our crafts and challenging one another. In this way, boundaries continue to be pushed.
From these collaborations, a new, free presentation will also emerge. In that context, experimentation is a plus. For me as an artist, it is the driving force that keeps the engine running.
Can you describe how you felt when you heard that you had been nominated for the NN Art Award?
I felt honoured, but also somewhat conflicted, as I’ve also been nominated for another prize recently [the Prix de Rome, ed.]. At the same time, I am very grateful that I am able to take up space as an artist and represent my imagination and the horror within it. It makes me happy that I am being welcomed into the art world with this work.
What project would you take on immediately if you were to win the award?
I would love to curate an exhibition myself with other makers and artists, working from project-based collectives. What I truly dream of are large installations in which others can physically enter our worlds. For me, one work is basically half a work. I enjoy creating series with multiple layers and contexts, in which all kinds of stories emerge. I would therefore like to realise a show in which a great deal of work comes together, with room for others to also take their place within it. I would want to curate that exhibition myself.
The winner of the NN Art Award 2026 will be announced on Friday 27 March at Kunsthal Rotterdam. During this festive evening, all exhibitions, including the NN Art Award exhibition, will be freely accessible to invited guests.
Written by Flor Linckens
During the upcoming edition of Art Rotterdam, the NN Art Award will be presented for the tenth time. This prestigious incentive prize is awarded to an artist showing work at the fair who has completed their education at a Dutch institution.
The award is not only a mark of recognition, but also offers artists support in further developing their practice. As part of the nomination, the work of all nominees will be on view at Kunsthal Rotterdam from 14 March to 25 May.
This year’s professional jury, representing a broad perspective on the contemporary art field, consisted of:
They nominated the following four artists:
Tina Farifteh (Tehran, 1982) is a photographer and filmmaker. In her work, she investigates how power structures affect the lives of ordinary people. She entices the viewer to look at subjects we would rather turn away from because they are complex or uncomfortable. For Document Nederland 2025, her project on the Dutch asylum system, Farifteh follows B., who, after more than four months in immigration detention at Schiphol and a stay in Ter Apel, enters the asylum procedure. By positioning B. as the narrator, Farifteh shifts our perspective on asylum processes. Rather than speaking about asylum seekers, she allows us to listen to them directly. In doing so, Farifteh holds up a mirror to the viewer: the work is not about them, but about us. Tina Farifteh is represented by Gallery Vriend van Bavink.
The work of Mandy Franca (Rotterdam, 1989) is an ongoing investigation into connectedness, drawing on her childhood in a cross-cultural environment and her personal memories. Franca examines and observes the significance of the everyday, granting lasting value to what may seem insignificant. As an artist, she subverts and questions the traditional use of printmaking by experimenting with a wide range of artistic media that come together in painting, iPhone photography, printmaking, drawing, collage, video, sound, sculpture and installation. Recurring elements are the photographic image and mark-making. Mandy Franca is represented by Night Café Gallery.
The practice of Fiona Lutjenhuis (Zevenaar, 1991) centres on depicting and reinterpreting the religious ideologies she grew up with in a village in North Brabant. Her parents were members of a sect based on a mix of theosophical ideas, esoteric cosmologies and beliefs in extraterrestrial life and supernatural beings. Lutjenhuis’ folding screens, drawings and murals function as carriers of stories. In a poetic way, she combines esoteric new age aesthetics with a range of visual influences drawn from comics, Japanese prints and medieval religious paintings. Fiona Lutjenhuis is represented by Galerie Fleur & Wouter.
Kyra Nijskens (Ulestraten, 1997) explores how humans influence and reshape ecological systems. Her work focuses on biofouling: the attachment of marine and micro-organisms to industrial structures such as ship hulls and underwater pipelines. Unnoticed, these organisms travel along shipping routes, settle and disrupt existing infrastructures. Her work also comments on logistical systems. Each year, 1,382 shipping containers are lost at sea, sometimes resulting in cargoes of Crocs or yellow rubber ducks polluting beaches.
The winner of the NN Art Award will be announced on Friday 27 March 2026 during a festive gathering at Kunsthal Rotterdam.
Written by Flor Linckens
“My delusional thinking brings sinister light, uncanny shadows, and a dystopian background, evoking the melancholy of my memory onto the canvas.” – Shimon Kamada
Through the fascinating psyche of artist Shimon Kamada (1997, Japan), we enter a treacherous terrain between abstraction and figuration. Here, a silver lining emerges: the relief that these two are not split ends of a spectrum at all. When reality begins to resemble a dream, and dreams become ever more rooted in reality, the duality itself starts to feel redundant. It is precisely within this intriguing in-between space that Kamada’s paintings take shape.
In the new art section of Art Rotterdam 2026, Diez Gallery presents a solo exhibition with recent works by Shimon Kamada which depict scenes from the artist’s early childhood until the present day. “My work is rooted in personal history and recalls nostalgic scenes from my mind. Having been away from my hometown in Japan for many years, I have had more time to reflect on it, and my recent works are influenced by customs, events, upbringing, and family dynamics. I hope they will evoke sensations of past memories running through the visitors’ minds, just like seeing a flashback.”
Using memory as his driving force brings with it an elusive, and therefore deceptive, creative energy. However at the same time, it can be strangely soothing and reassuring when our minds start to play tricks on us, as our recollection begins to lose clarity. Fusing seemingly divergent elements of reality, figuration, abstraction and fiction together is one of Kamada’s ways of coping with latent trauma. “There are many moments I want to return to; they are so beautiful that it feels almost pitiful to forget them, yet they are also painful memories I wish I could do over,” Kamada says.
In his latest series of works, Kamada also touches upon the overlapping and intersectional nature of lived experiences and the memories attached to them. He refers to an intimate family situation that became a profound experience for his work: a few years ago, his grandfather asked him to paint his funeral portrait, shortly before being diagnosed with a terminal illness. As different family members responded to his illness from their own positions, Kamada became increasingly aware of the conflicting emotions surrounding that moment. “By depicting our memories and the unique position of each family member, I explore these conflicting emotions to find ways to empathize with one another. It allows every family member to become an important character in my paintings.”
By projecting these different positions and sensations into dreamlike scenes, viewers with different memories may draw different worlds from Kamada’s paintings. An agency of one’s subjectivity is felt throughout the openness that Kamada provides. “My house, for example, is a typical Japanese home, but certain elements escape recognition by Western audiences and evoke unexpected interpretations. I hope viewers imagine the events depicted in my paintings as if they were happening in their own lives, and that a deja vu-like experience will provide opportunities for us to share stories in front of my paintings.”
Also the physical materiality of the paintings overlaps with Kamada’s emotional concept. The artist has already been experimenting with the approach of repainting on used canvases, but more recently he sands the surface as well to reveal fragments of hidden paintings on the underlayer. “I apply acrylic and oil on secondhand paintings and then damage the surface with sandpaper. The layered paint displays the multifaceted reality in everyday life moments. In each painting I depict family members that I extract from photo albums. I think sanding feels like an additional process to reinforce the context of recorrection. The damaged texture and faded colours even evoke the old photo albums, and the layering of new paintings on old paintings represents the process of memory: new pieces of information accumulate and overlay the old ones.”
It is as if sanding is Kamada’s way of treating the surface like a wooden dining table that holds dear memories of family meals, coffee stains, love and conflict, gently sanded down over the years, only so it can be lived with again, allowing new memories to settle over the old ones.
And so it becomes clear that beyond what the eye can perceive Kamada’s paintings capture what lies dormant in the subconscious: the vapourness of time, the lingering scents of fading stories, and the nostalgia that comes with reliving memories, whether real, imagined, or somewhere in between.
Bio
Shimon Kamada (1997, Japan, lives and works in The Netherlands) won the Ron Mandos Residency Award (2020) and worked at Brutus Lab in Rotterdam (2021) as an artist-in-residence. He has participated in group exhibitions including Podium Gallery, Hong Kong (2025), Van Nelle Fabriek, Rotterdam (2024), Enari Gallery, Amsterdam (2023), ARWE Gallery, Gouda (2022), Wilford X, Temse (2022), Felix Solo Gallery, Nijmegen (2021), Atelier of AVL Mundo, Rotterdam (2021), Het HEM, Zaandam (2020), among others.
On show at New Art section, Shimon Kamada, diez gallery
Written by Emily van Driessen
First look, then read. Let your eyes take everything in before forming an opinion and only then read the title. That applies to the viewing of all art, but especially to the newest work by Helen Verhoeven. If you go by the titles alone, you miss the actual subject of the image. It is not the black cat in Black Cat, the white mask in White Mask or the yellow head in Yellow Head; rather, they are a corpse, a pistol—aimed at the viewer—and a machine gun. The subject is violence and its consequences.
The artworks are part of the series Verhoeven has made over the past year titled Because. Because is no more than a prompt toward an explanation, because without further qualification, it has something of a lazy appeal to authority: simply because I say so, simply because it can be done and because I felt like it. Seen this way, it seems to concern senseless violence.
Helen Verhoeven’s work can be seen at the Annet Gelink Gallery stand. At the time of publication, it is not yet clear which work will be shown.
Verhoeven’s work is a combination of figuration and abstraction. She uses different textures and patterns, giving the entirety an almost collage-like effect. In Verhoeven’s work, you can see exactly what is happening on the canvas. You recognise the situations, the spaces, references to current events or historical occurrences and you can interpret the body language and facial expressions of human figures. At the same time, little is worked out in detail, which also gives Verhoeven’s work a magical quality, like a scene from a dream. The image is as tangible as a thought. At any moment, it could burst apart or slip through your fingers.
Verhoeven’s palette also leads you astray. At first glance, the purple, blue and pink feel cheerful, but the colours are almost always accompanied by a grey undertone. This makes them appear matte. The subjects, by contrast, are generally darker and anything but naive. Thematically, Verhoeven connects autobiographical elements with universal themes such as fertility and beauty, also touching on subjects like power relations and death. The work in Because is no exception.
“My paintings often depict unpleasant things, but hopefully, with a certain lightness, because humour is ultimately the best antidote to all misery,” she said a few years ago to Het Parool. Because of that lightness, Verhoeven’s work always presents you with a whole range of emotions. In Black Cat, we see a black cat next to what appears to be a deceased person. The black cat sheds a tear, but in such a way that it feels light. Something cheerful.
Helen Verhoeven (Leiden, 1974) lives and works in Berlin. She has a studio in Lichtenberg, a district in former East Berlin, just outside the S-Bahn ring. Her studio is housed in an old Stasi listening station and overlooks a former Stasi prison. At first, she did not know what had taken place there. That might even have been too much for someone who, for a time, actively sought out difficult emotional and mental experiences and drew on them for her work.
One of the places where she encountered such intense experiences was the secondary school Verhoeven attended in 1986. That year, the Verhoeven family moved from the neatly groomed town of Oegstgeest to the metropolis of Los Angeles due to her father’s film career. A great contrast in terms of liveliness, but also in terms of society. On the surface, it resembles ours, but one that overlooks the enormous differences in opportunity, health and prosperity.
Verhoeven’s parents moved to L.A. with a progressive, European mindset. As a result, they chose to send Verhoeven and her sister to a local public school, as was customary in the Netherlands. At that school, she came into contact with aggression, alcohol, drugs, sexual boundary-crossing behaviour and gangs. “I arrived as a child who had experienced nothing and within a year, I felt as though I had experienced just about everything and the innocence of my youth was gone.” From the age of 15, she attended another school that was geographically close by, but with a completely different composition.
During her American academy years at the San Francisco Art Institute and New York Academy of Art, she actively sought out intense emotional experiences—shocks she could process in her work. “I wanted to see, feel and experience the bad; as if only that were real life.” For example, she worked at an abortion clinic in a disadvantaged neighbourhood, where she encountered the most heartbreaking situations. Verhoeven comments, “A very young girl came in for an abortion. She had an enormous, homemade tattoo of a penis on her stomach. Terrifying—that image has always stayed with me.”
She also worked for a while in an emergency room, dissected corpses in a laboratory and helped out for some time at a homeless shelter. Verhoeven continues, “I collected an endless well of feelings alongside factual knowledge.” She justified this to herself by making work about it, but this has come at a price: “It produced interesting art—and still does—but I also suffered from those deliberately sustained traumas.”
During her working process, Verhoeven seals off her studio hermetically from the critical gaze of outsiders. A single word about a work that is not yet finished can ruin a painting. Verhoeven explains, “I find making art extremely private, very personal.” For a while, she made a lot of work about mothers and children as a way of dealing with the fact that she was unable to become pregnant. A month later, she turned out to be expecting after all. Verhoeven says, “I find painting to be a kind of exorcism anyway. You let it go, you let it out and you move on.”
That not every work needs to be preceded by an intense emotional experience is demonstrated by the work Verhoeven has made on commission. In 2015, she completed an ambitious work for the Supreme Court of the Netherlands and in 2021, The Family, an imposing group portrait of the Royal Family, starting with Juliana of Stolberg. Both works of art were preceded by extensive studies.
The Supreme Court painting is imposing in every respect. The canvas measures no less than 4 by 6.5 meters—Verhoeven worked on it for a year—and is packed with historical and art-historical references to the development of Dutch law. But here, too, all is not peace and harmony. The Supreme Court rather holds up a mirror to us. The judiciary and rule of law as we know them are just as fragile as the dream images in a series like Because. Over the centuries, a price has been paid for them and if we do not maintain them, they will disappear like snow in the sun.
On the walls of the courtroom, we see former politicians, scholars, heads of state and philosophers. Most striking is the famous painting of the lynched De Witt brothers by Jan de Baen. In front of it sits the Supreme Court under the leadership of its president, Lodewijk Ernst Visser, who was the first Jewish-Dutch president of the Supreme Court, but was dismissed by the German occupiers in 1941—without public protest from the other justices. In the foreground, we see a crowd of sad, angry, lonely, kind and familiar figures who together form our society.
Helen Verhoeven’s work is included in, among others, the collections of the Centraal Museum, Stedelijk Museum and Bonnefantenmuseum, where she held a solo exhibition in 2018. Her work can also be found in the collections of the Saatchi Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, DSM, De Nederlandsche Bank, Eneco and Rabobank. In 2008, she won the Royal Award for Modern Painting, followed by the Wolvecamp Prize in 2010 and ABN AMRO Art Award in 2018. Helen Verhoeven is represented by the Annet Gelink Gallery.
Written by Wouter van den Eijkel
From Friday 27 to Sunday 29 March, Art Rotterdam returns with a sharpened fair format that brings together visual art, photography, video and large-scale installations. The format offers space for both emerging talent and established galleries, while the addition of Unseen Photo introduces a sharply curated and internationally oriented photography programme, fully integrated into the fair. With the return to Rotterdam Ahoy, Art Rotterdam continues the course set in 2025. The venue’s scale and openness, along with its hospitality facilities, contribute to a pleasant visit with room for quiet moments of rest. As a result, visitors spend more time on the fair floor. Last year, Art Rotterdam welcomed 28,000 visitors.
This edition features over 150 galleries from the Netherlands and abroad, including exhibitors from Lisbon, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Johannesburg, Bratislava, London, Rome, Paris, Madrid, Vienna and Riga. Art Rotterdam also maintains a strong bond with the city. The Wall Street Journal recently included Rotterdam in their 10 Best Places to Visit in 2026: “The city has reinvented itself as one of Europe’s most experimental urban laboratories, with starchitect-designed towers and cultural districts built on former docklands.” Last year, the city saw the opening of the 15,000 m² migration museum Fenix, and the brand-new eight-storey Nederlands Fotomuseum is set to open its doors soon with a festive launch.
DHB Bank returns as the main sponsor of Art Rotterdam. DHB Bank is a Dutch savings bank where you can save online. Its head office has been based in Rotterdam for over 30 years. Over time, the city became its home base, which is one of the reasons DHB Bank proudly supports Art Rotterdam.
Art Rotterdam is divided into distinct sections that offer a clear and coherent view of today’s contemporary art practice. These sections help visitors to navigate the fair.
Art Rotterdam 2026 sections
In the Main Section, participating galleries present a diverse selection of contemporary art. The Solo/Duo section is integrated within this format, with booths that highlight the work of one or two artists.
The New Art Section is devoted to solo presentations by emerging artists with exciting practices. After a successful first edition, curator Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu returns for Art Rotterdam 2026. In addition to Unseen booths in the Main and Solo/Duo sections, three specially curated sections form a distinctive photography pavilion: New Photography, Encounters and The Past Present. These sections explore hybrid visual languages, crossovers with other disciplines, and new perspectives on analogue photography and archival material. Alongside this, the Unseen Book Market will take place in the new Nederlands Fotomuseum, where forty publishers present a wide selection of photobooks and publications. Van Lanschot Kempen is the new partner of Unseen Photo.
The Prospects section by the Mondriaan Fund introduces a broad audience to a new generation of artists. This fourteenth edition presents work by 92 emerging artists who received financial support in 2024 to help launch their careers. The exhibition is curated by Johan Gustavsson and Daphne Verberg.
Projections is the fair’s video art section: a darkened space of over 800 square metres with twelve projections on freestanding five-metre-wide screens.
Sculpture Park serves as a meeting point within the fair, offering 280 square metres of sculptures and installations. Designed by Tom Postma Design, the section literally brings air and space into the fair layout.
Highlights
kumalo | turpin from Johannesburg presents work by Boemo Diale in the Main Section. Diale grew up within the complex racial and socio-political structures of post-apartheid South Africa and works from a multidisciplinary practice in which identity, generational trauma and dreams converge. Her visual language is deeply personal, with a strong focus on her maternal lineage, while also addressing the shared cultural heritage of African women. By intertwining fragments from her family archive with colourful, dreamlike settings, she creates friction between reality and imagination, raising questions about her position, origins and the potential of art to effect change.
Kévin Bray (Upstream Gallery) works from a multidisciplinary practice where digital and physical realities continuously merge, using video, digital painting, 3D-printed sculptures and sound as equal components. Drawing on his background in graphic design, the French artist unpacks the logic of software, games and interfaces, translating these into hybrid forms that demonstrate how images shape not only our perception, but also our behaviour and reality. In the Main Section, it becomes clear how Bray deliberately equalises fiction and matter, consistently dissolving the boundaries between digital and tactile, imagination and reality. His work was previously shown at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Kunstinstituut Melly, Foam Amsterdam, Het Nieuwe Instituut and The Hole in New York, and has been included in the collections of the AkzoNobel Art Foundation, ING and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPEN from Bratislava (Main Section) presents work by Vladimír Ossif, a painter working within the tradition of geometric abstraction. The Slovak artist spent time in cities such as Paris, Bratislava, Madrid and New York, and his vibrant paintings are therefore infused with motion and change, expressed in dynamic compositions in which forms collide, overlap or balance alongside each other. His works explore what images can communicate when language falls short. His work is included in the collections of Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Casa de Velázquez in Madrid and the National Gallery in Prague, and was featured in the 13th Havana Biennial.
In the Solo/Duo section at Annet Gelink Gallery, works are presented by Helen Verhoeven and Steffani Jemison, two artists who each in their own way explore the tension between individual and collective, delving into themes of the body and representation. Jemison investigates how African-American culture, history, knowledge systems, movement, language and storytelling are transmitted, creating performances, videos, audio works and sculptures that have been shown at MoMA, the Whitney Museum (the Whitney Biennial), the Brooklyn Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Jeu de Paume and MoMA PS1. Verhoeven works with large, layered paintings in which dream, history, religion, mythology and social violence merge. She created a royal portrait for the Dutch Royal Family, and her work has been included in the collections of the Centraal Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Bonnefanten museum, Saatchi Gallery, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, De Nederlandsche Bank and Rabobank.
In the Main Section, Heejsteck# presents the installation ‘Add to Cart’ by Peer Vink and Tom Putman. The project takes the shopping mall as a starting point, not as a nostalgic backdrop but as an outdated status symbol, comparable to a film set that convinces from a distance but reveals its construction up close. The largely enclosed booth is accessible only through a cave-like portal and leads to an artificial grotto with a waterfall and bar, exposing how artificial nature and fictional worlds are used to drive desire and consumption. The installation is accompanied by new works from both artists.
Stephan Balkenhol creates hand-carved wooden sculptures in which the human figure almost always takes centre stage. He typically carves his works from a single block of wood, sometimes even an entire tree trunk, using hammers and chisels with minimal use of machinery, leaving visible splinters, cracks and grooves. Shown by AKINCI in the Main Section, his practice reveals how this sober, artisanal approach results in sculptures that resonate universally. His work is held in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Tate, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Museum Voorlinden, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, MoMA, LACMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, Hamburger Bahnhof, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and Kunstmuseum Den Haag. His work was recently shown in a solo exhibition at Kunsthal Rotterdam.
In the Solo/Duo section, Galerie Fontana presents work by Thijs Segers, including recent paintings and a new installation. Segers explores themes such as decay, transformation and impermanence. His paintings capture both personal memories and universal themes, often inspired by abandoned places, nature and his inner world. His work has previously been shown at the Noordbrabants Museum, Paleis op de Dam, the Vincent van GoghHuis, Museum Villa Mondriaan and Het HEM. In 2021, 2024 and 2025 he was nominated for the Royal Award for Modern Painting.
For tickets and a full list of participants, visit www.artrotterdam.com. The fair catalogue will be published on GalleryViewer.com on 20 March 2026.
Written by Flor Linckens
From 27 to 29 March 2026, Unseen Photo will present a sharply curated international photography programme within Art Rotterdam at Rotterdam Ahoy, bringing together established names and emerging talent. This year, Unseen consists of six interconnected components. On the fair floor, Unseen appears in the Main Section and the Solo/Duo programme, both tightly selected and fully embedded among the wider Art Rotterdam presentations across 14,000 m².
The curated sections bring Unseen’s conceptual depth into focus. Presenting photography within a curated framework lends the works a museum-level focus while revealing how dynamic, varied and resonant the medium is today. The New Photography section, curated by the Unseen fair committee (Caroline O’Breen, Domenico de Chirico, Els Drummen, Hedy van Erp and Dries Roelens), forms a distinctive photographic pavilion on the fair floor, together with Encounters and The Past Present.
In Encounters, the Milan-based curator Domenico de Chirico examines the interplay between photography and other artistic practices, generating new narratives and hybrid visual worlds that stretch the medium’s boundaries.
In The Past Present, photo historian, curator and author Hedy van Erp offers a contemporary perspective on analogue photography up to the year 2000, with particular attention to lost archives and found images. She brings together artists who use existing photographic material and techniques in new ways, to restore weight and meaning to the past.
Together, these curated sections offer a layered overview of photographic positions, ranging from conceptual research projects to spatial installations and post-digital image culture. The featured artists respond to themes such as identity, technology and materiality as well as to the shifting circulation and interpretation of images. As a result, Unseen Photo develops a distinct signature within Art Rotterdam and deepens the fair’s artistic scope, creating a platform that connects photography with other contemporary disciplines in a dynamic environment that appeals to a young and international public.
The sixth pillar, the Unseen Book Market, takes place simultaneously at the new location of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Pakhuis Santos, which opens in February. In the museum, an official partner, forty publishers present a wide range of photobooks and publications.
Unseen Photo is powered by the new Partner Van Lanschot Kempen.
A number of highlights
Several presentations stand out within the selection.
Intervalle (Paris) highlights Julien Mignot’s series “Screenlove” in the New Photography section. In these works, the artist examines how intimacy and distance shift in an era in which relationships unfold through screens. Mignot works with blurred webcam images, created with the explicit consent of his models, which he casts in semi-transparent blocks, so that the image appears or disappears depending on the viewing angle. The series, rooted in his youthful curiosity about the lives unfolding behind windows, reflects on digital voyeurism, the fragility of relationships, contemporary forms of loneliness and the power embedded in the act of looking. For Unseen Photo 2026 Intervalle presents new, previously unseen works from the series. Mignot has previously created commissioned work for The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Chanel, Hermès, Louis Vuitton and the Opéra de Paris.
In the Encounters section, VIASATERNA (Milan) will show work by Teresa Giannico, who transforms digital image fragments from the online realm into layered compositions at the intersection of photography, collage and painting. Her dreamlike scenes reveal how algorithms shape our ways of seeing and how the mind reconstructs fragmented imagery into new realities. In her recent work, she examines the objectivity of photography with both precision and poetic restraint, in an age of endless digital reproducibility. Until 18 January 2026, her work is on view at the eighteenth Quadriennale d’Arte in Rome.
Hedy van Erp: “Ray K. Metzker (1931–2014, United States) is regarded as part of the photographic avant-garde and a pioneer of urban photography, in which he experimented extensively with light. In 2026, a monograph of his work, City Lux, will be published. His work is held in the collections of institutions including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum, the J Paul Getty Museum and the Albertina. The Paris gallery Les Douches La Galerie is presenting rare vintage Ray Metzker prints, which are seldom offered.”
Erika Deák Gallery (Budapest) will present work by Andrea Gáldi Vinkó in the Encounters section. In her practice, the artist examines the tension between intimacy, identity and the vulnerability of everyday life, weaving personal experience together with universal themes. Her photographs, often balancing between the everyday and the absurdly poetic, have been shown at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center and Kunsthalle Budapest. She has created commissioned work for Tate, Vogue Italia, The New Yorker, Die Zeit, i-D, Dazed and Le Monde. With her distinctive visual narratives, she is regarded as one of the most compelling voices in Hungarian photography.
In “ReCollection”, Casper Faassen (Bildhalle, Amsterdam, in the Solo/Duo section) explores how photography can move beyond documentation into an almost sculptural form by creating 1:1 reinterpretations of contested colonial artefacts from museum collections such as those of the Louvre and the British Museum. In a contemporary Wunderkammer, he gathers these photographic objects as a critical reflection on collecting, ownership and the stories inherited from previous generations. Through layered techniques, visible traces of time and the question of who holds the right to preserve history, Faassen turns photography into a poetic and political medium.
Einspach & Czapolai Fine Art (Budapest) will show work by Tamas Dezsö in the Main Section. His ongoing series ‘Notes for an Epilogue’ reveals the quiet legacy of a post-communist Romania. Dezsö’s work captures with remarkable sensitivity how history becomes embedded in the everyday and shapes the ways societies move forward in the layered aftermath of a regime. His photographs have been shown at Foam Photography Museum Amsterdam, the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center and the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, and have appeared in publications such as The New York Times and Le Monde.
About the curators
Domenico de Chirico is an independent curator based in Milan. He taught Visual Culture and Trend Research at Istituto Europeo di Design Milan (2011–2015) and served as Artistic Director of DAMA Fair, Turin (2016–2019). His experience includes jury roles, artist residencies, and teaching positions at institutions such as Goldsmiths (London), Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (Prague), Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (Milan), and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna. He has been a visiting curator at the Swiss Institute in Rome and the Artistic Director of Ortigia Contemporanea 2024. Current projects include curatorial roles at SWAB Barcelona, MIA Photo Fair (Milan), and Prisma Art Prize (Rome).
Hedy van Erp is a Dutch photo historian, curator, and author specialising in vintage and vernacular photography. She has worked on exhibitions for institutions such as the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Fotomuseum The Hague, the National Media Museum (UK), the Science Museum (London) and (now) H’ART Museum in Amsterdam. She is also the co-author of Photography Decoded (Tate Publishing, 2019). Current projects include an exhibition co-curated with Susan Bright, scheduled for June 2026 at the Alice Austen House Museum in New York, and an upcoming issue of the international photozine Fotozini, dedicated to vintage, obscure and unconventional photography.
Art Rotterdam / Unseen Photo collaborates with We Are Public. Cultural optimists who strivefor more art and culture in the Netherlands. Did you know you can also become a member? With We Are Public, you attend a curated selection of culture; carefully chosen by We Are Public curators. Often free, sometimes with a substantial discount. With the bonus, of course, that you support art and culture! Will you become a member too? Get your first month free now: www.wearepublic.nl
‘We are radical and we are playful. We pull you out of your comfort zone. We work together with you. We let you form a new relationship with your environment.’ Signed: Studio C.A.R.E. There is not a single word of exaggeration in those statements. C.A.R.E. stands for Catastrophe, Analysis, Relation, Environment. That may sound like abstract management jargon, but the working method of the Rotterdam-based Studio C.A.R.E. is in fact very physical and tangible.
‘We sell catastrophes,’ Christine van Meegen says over the phone. Not that Studio C.A.R.E. inflicts a catastrophe on you, as these catastrophes have already taken place. Instead, Studio C.A.R.E. offers you a way out of a difficult situation. For example, this may involve your immediate surroundings, such as your home. The German couple behind Studio C.A.R.E., Van Meegen and her partner Sebastian Kubersky, do not approach this half-heartedly. Just ask Patrick, the man who gave them permission to remodel his house. Everything was tackled: walls were taken down with a sledgehammer and furniture was sawn apart.
Patrick had not been feeling quite himself for some time and his cluttered living space certainly did not help. Time for a change. NDR, Norddeutscher Rundfund, filmed the Abrissparty – a term that captures the spirit of the event better than the prosaic word ‘renovation’.
The concept is best described as a combination of Help, My Husband is a DIY Disaster – including the setbacks during construction and mental walls people run into – with an extended consultation with a decisive psychologist. But C.A.R.E. uses a sledgehammer instead of the insights of Carl Jung. If all goes well, the renovation has a cathartic effect and by the end, your relationship with your environment will be restored.
It may sound drastic, but nothing could be further from the truth. Studio C.A.R.E. works according to a plan. Everything was discussed with Patrick beforehand: what would happen and what role he and the neighbours would play in the process. That said, there is room for improvisation. Moreover, Patrick was in safe hands. Christine van Meegen has a background in interior design and has studied, among other places, at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Afterward graduation, Van Meegen and Kubersky decided to stay in the Netherlands, with Rotterdam as their base.
The couple’s practice extends beyond the ‘curated catastrophes’, of which Patrick’s apartment is an example. A common denominator is that they work with local residents. This winter, together with residents of the working-class neighbourhood Bospolder-Tussendijken, they developed heating panels. Nine groups developed and tested an infrared panel. These panels heat the body instead of the room, and do so in a highly energy-efficient way. The underlying idea is to prevent people on tight budgets from being left in the cold.
Another example is the playful modular (wall) system ROSy – short for Rotterdam interior – made of perforated board. ROSy allows users to organise a space according to their own preferences and insights. Once again, the duo aims to reconnect people with their environment by giving them control over it.
At Art Rotterdam, you’ll find a sculpture by Studio C.A.R.E. in the Sculpture Park. When we talked to Van Meegen in mid-January, she did not yet know how the sculpture will look. “We often respond to the space that is available to us. We need to gauge how much space we get and what kind of space it is. Ideally, it becomes a sculpture you can physically enter, with a surprise inside.”
Studio C.A.R.E. is represented by Galerie Melike Bilir from Hamburg. The Galerie Melike Bilir stand can be found in the New Art Section.
Written by Wouter van den Eijkel
Last year’s Art Rotterdam edition was not only the first at the new Ahoy location, it also marked the introduction of the new main partner: DHB Bank. Looking back on a successful launch, the bank has decided to extend the partnership for the coming years.
One of the highlights of Art Rotterdam 2025 was the presentation of the DHB Art Space. With this initiative, DHB Bank invites young talent to take a look at making the city more sustainable. The upcoming edition will once again give special attention to the future of Rotterdam South.
“Art lends itself well to this,” says Okan Balköse, CEO of DHB Bank: “Artists can make us look at the world differently and thus inspire us towards sustainability. With the DHB Art Space, we give Rotterdam artists a platform and want to stimulate visitors with fresh ideas for a better world.”
Fons Hof, director of Art Rotterdam: “With the move to Ahoy last year, we wanted to anchor ourselves in Rotterdam South. That ambition has been realized, partly thanks to the powerful presentation in the DHB Art Space by curators Houcem Bellakoud and Jeanthalou Haynes. The fact that DHB remains our Main Partner and continues the DHB Art Space with the same curatorial duo not only strengthens the fair, but also Rotterdam and Rotterdam South in particular.”
The thirteenth edition of Unseen, now part of Art Rotterdam, will take place at the end of March 2026 — and not, as previously announced, this coming September at Amsterdam’s NDSM Loods. Unseen and Art Rotterdam are joining forces and are currently preparing for their first joint edition, scheduled to take place from March 26 to 29, 2026, at Rotterdam Ahoy. Like Art Rotterdam 2025, this combined edition will cover an area of 14,000 m².
In recent years, Unseen has been confronted with a diminishing role of photography within gallery programs and a declining number of galleries exclusively focused on photography. The strategic alliance with Art Rotterdam opens new doors for Unseen: a compact, carefully curated and sharply focused selection of photography within a broader contemporary art context.
Art Rotterdam, widely praised as an experiential fair with a variety of sections under one roof — including video art, sculptures, and large-scale installations — will become even more diverse and appealing to a young and international audience through the addition of a strong photography section.
A stronger platform for photography
Fons Hof, director of Art Rotterdam and Unseen Amsterdam:
“Especially in a time when the photography market is facing challenges, the integration of Unseen into Art Rotterdam offers a unique opportunity for renewal. This creates a more powerful platform that strengthens photography as an essential voice within contemporary art.”
Benefits of the new joint setup
In addition to benefiting from Art Rotterdam’s visitor flows and promotional efforts, Unseen will maintain its focus on international collectors, curators, and photography professionals. In collaboration with the fair’s curators, Unseen is developing several special programs. The reopening of the Dutch Photo Museum in the iconic Santos warehouse in Rotterdam will play a prominent role in this context.
Moreover, Unseen’s social media channels (92,000 Instagram followers) will remain exclusively focused on photography presentations. This ensures additional exposure for the selected Unseen works during Art Rotterdam. The strategic merger offers photographic talent a broader platform.
Unseen’s unique identity and mission — to discover and support emerging photographic talent — will remain central and will be further sharpened within the multidisciplinary framework of Art Rotterdam.
Unseen Book Market @ The National Museum of Photography
During Unseen Photo 2026 at Ahoy Rotterdam, the Book Market will run concurrently at the newly opened Dutch Museum of Photography. The museum’s entrance space will accommodate approximately 40 publishers, creating a comprehensive hub for special books and other photography publications. Beginning of 2026 The National Museum of Photography opens in a spectacular new building in Rotterdam. Warehouse Santos offers an impressive eight floors dedicated to photography.
