Gabriele Beveridge & Paul Kooiker

KETELEER GALLERY is proud to present the first joint exhibition by Gabriele Beveridge and Paul Kooiker.

Gabriele Beveridge, born in Hong Kong in 1985, is a British artist recognized for her conceptual and sculptural practice, absorbing the urban environment in which she moves and interrogating the materials that define its contours. Paul Kooiker, born in Rotterdam in 1964, is a Dutch artist whose distinctive style ignores the line between fine art and photography, often exploring themes of voyeurism, the human body, and the act of looking itself.

Both artists examine the cosmetic forces that fuel our consumer desires, pushing them to their extremes. By investigating the commodification of the body and the paradoxes of beauty ideals, Beveridge and Kooiker reveal the surreal and fragmented nature of these concepts, challenging our conventional perceptions. Their use of unsettling imagery, intriguing framing, and provocative compositions merges seemingly opposing elements into carefully constructed dialogues. These works continuously hover on the edge of discomfort and critique, creating an unsettling allure that lingers in the viewer's mind.

Gabriele Beveridge works with a wide variety of materials, ranging from glass and metal to synthetic hair and the readymade. Her approach to sculpture challenges conventional ideas about form and perception. Initially drawn to glass through her experimentation with photography, Beveridge harnesses the material to capture a moment of transformation, not unlike photography’s ability itself to freeze moments in time. By testing the material’s fluid dynamics she reveals its changing nature and the difficulty of human control over it. Besides glass, a recurring motif in Beveridge’s work is the use of frames and mirrors, which also play with reflection, transparency, and the gaze of the viewer. In her sculptures, Beveridge regularly integrates display structures, such as shelving units and racks, with more organic forms, reimagining their material significance. This dialogue between object and material is both poetic and provocative, disrupting their commercial and functional purposes.

Paul Kooiker's photographs stand out for their unconventional setups, disorienting accents, and a certain rawness that challenges traditional aesthetics. His work often evokes a sense of discomfort. Through his unique subject matter and the enigmatic way in which he presents it, Kooiker pushes the viewer to engage deeply. His works can appear both abstract and highly detailed, with their narrative or meaning often left open to interpretation. His style is at once intimate and detached, conceptual and realistic, prompting reflection on the complex relationship between photographer, subject, and observer. For the past five years he created works that flirt with the boundary between commerce and art – the division between his fashion photography and autonomous works is almost impossible to distinguish.