Joep Van Lieshout

Atelier Van Lieshout is the studio founded by sculptor, painter and visionary Joep van Lieshout.

After graduating from the Rotterdam Art Academy, he quickly rose to fame with projects that traveled between the world of easy-clean design and the non-functional area of art, including: sculpture and installations, buildings and furniture, utopias and dystopias. 

Since its founding in 1995, he has been working solely under the studio’s name as a methodology towards undermining the myth of the artistic genius. Over the past three decades, the studio has established a multidisciplinary practice that produces works on the borders between art, design and architecture. By investigating the thin line between manufacturing art and mass-producing functional objects, he seeks to find the boundaries between fantasy and function, between fertility and destruction. He dissects systems, whether society as a whole or the human body. All of these activities are conducted within his signature style of provocation — be it political or material. His works share a number of recurring themes, motives and obsessions — systems, power, autarky, life, sex and death — which trace the human individual in the face of a greater whole.

 

Photo Credit: Ben Kleyn