Galerie Fontana would like to welcome you to the solo exhibition ‘Hogevaart en de bekoring van het kleine’ featuring new paintings by Thijs Segers. The exhibition will open during the Festive Gallery Night of Amsterdam Art Week 2025, on Thursday 22 May between 17:00 and 21:00, in the presence of the artist.
During the opening, a small catalogue featuring the paintings in the exhibition, along with written contributions by Kars Persoon and Tobias Thaens, will be presented.
Central themes in the paintings of Thijs Segers are the beauty and mystery of decay and transience, combined with a search for something everlasting—a search for a home. Thijs Segers: “My work is an intimate embrace with transience. I envelop subjects close to myself, like my dog Butske or abandoned scenes in and around my home, in a wistful cloak, without suffocating them with my fear of the world. Drawing mostly on nature, I try to find a way to accept decay. The paintings exist just before the lightest light and the darkest dark, in the in-between space of earth and the world of thought.”
The apparent randomness in the paintings of Thijs Segers is reminiscent of sedimentation in a river. Small stones or grains of sand are constantly on the move until the river’s flow slows down, allowing them to settle on the bottom and become part of the local landscape.
Many key elements in Segers’ work have entered his life in a similar way. For instance, he inherited the pigments he paints with from a painter whose house he moved into after the artist’s passing. Wanting to find a way to use these pigments, Segers began making his own tempera paint—the medium he now works with almost exclusively. He first started using tempera during a residency at the former studio of the late Leon Adriaans, an artist with whom Segers has maintained a one-sided friendship ever since.
This subtle proximity between Segers’ personal surroundings, the subjects of his paintings, and the way they are rendered is the focal point of his art. The paintings resemble the thin skin that forms when milk is boiled—a fragile membrane that appears when the difference in heat is too great. The egg tempera behaves in a similar way: many thin, transparent layers of paint create over- and underexposed scenes in which rooms, (domestic) animals, and the surrounding landscape are granted eternal life.
The pace at which the outside world seeps into his paintings is carefully considered; it often takes Segers a long time before he paints anything from his own life. Only when he fears losing something does he reach for his brushes.
Tobias Thaens
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Thijs Segers (NL 1996) graduated in Fine Art (BA) painting from AKI ArtEZ academy
for art & design Enschede (2020). His work has been exhibited throughout the
Netherlands, including at the Noordbrabants Museum, the Vincent van Goghhuis and
Museum Villa Mondriaan. In 2020 he received the HeArtfund-stipend and in 2025 he
is financially supported by the Mondriaan Fund. In 2021, 2024 and 2025 he was
nominated for the Royal award for modern Painting.
More information:
www.galeriefontana.com
www.thijssegers.com