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Galerie Gerhard Hofland completes the gallery season with the exhibition Studio Life in collaboration with Whatspace, a collective by Koen Delaere and Bas van den Hurk. The exhibition combines the abstract works of seven artists from the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

Studio Life shows diverse works that have one common pervading element; playful abstraction. In the exhibition one can see each artist's search for an abstract language. A search that often takes place in the intimacy of the studio, the artist's laboratory. Most of them find inspiration in daily life: in their paintings they use fragments of familiar visual information or respond to the environment they find themselves in. The quest for a personal abstract language is often a lengthy process in which the physical material and the process itself become the subject of research and experimentation. For this generation of abstract painters this quest is not meant to arrive at aesthetic perfection. Although their carefully constructed abstract works are reminiscent of  the pioneers of abstraction – the Cubists, Abstract expressionists and the Minimalists- these works are of a different order. Every rule, every dogma is thrown overboard in favour of playfulness and openness for spontaneous encounters. The intuitive process of the quest itself is paramount, resulting in paintings that contain imperfections or incomplete parts appearing them to be in a dynamic state of perpetual development. It is therefore not so much the process of painting that is at stake here but the process of looking: these painters make the viewer partake in continuously reviewing and reassessing visual information; a playful process of changing visual awareness through looking at the world around us afresh moment by moment.