LANG invites you to the new duo show by Emo Verkerk and Kiana Girigorie. During Gallery Night on 5 September you can preview the exhibition. The exhibition will officially open on Saturday, 6 September, from 16:00 to 19:00.
“Under the surface of the ordinary, cats and heretics move in silence—their trails murmuring of magic and dissent.”
In the duo exhibition Cats and Heretics, Emo Verkerk and Kiana Girigorie bring their worlds into dialogue—a conversation between thought and intuition, between form and distortion, between what is seen and what resists being shown.
Emo Verkerk, (Amsterdam 1955) is one of the most distinctive Dutch painters of his generation, is known for his conceptual portraits. These are not likenesses, but reflections, portraits as ideas, testing the boundaries of identity, image, and meaning.
Kiana Girigorie, (Los Angeles 1997) works with paint to navigate a fluid terrain of memory,
embodiment, and origin. Her paintings are layered translations of inner space, intense, rhythmic, and charged with undercurrents of emotion and intuition. Through color, texture, and form, she seeks what cannot be spoken directly: sensory memory, inherited presence, and the ritual of repetition and release.
When Kiana Girigorie speaks about Emo Verkerk, she doesn’t use grand words like “influence” or “school.” She prefers to call him an example in freedom. She admires his way of working — his unconventional approach to portraiture, his freedom in form and color, and his ability to combine conceptual depth with humor. Girigorie, born into a world of pixels, anime, and constant stimuli, recognizes something timeless in Verkerk: the courage to lose yourself in your own visual language, without map or compass. Her canvases are bolder, interlaced with magical-realist symbols, but beneath the surface beats the same conviction — that art only truly breathes when the maker shapes it without fear. In this shared attitude lies their relationship. No generational gap, no stylistic imitation, but a parallel current. Two ways of seeing, in search of the same unspoken essence. Katten en Ketters is not a search for agreement, but an invitation to difference. In the friction between two worlds — Verkerk’s contemplative gaze and Girigorie’s intuitive energy — a vibrant space emerges, full of questions, movement, and imagination. An exhibition that doesn’t tell
you what to see, but invites you to look again.
