Glitch: Tjebbe Beekman’s New Works Explore the Pictorial Language of Thought and Emotion
Show Title: Glitch
Gallery: GRIMM Gallery, Amsterdam
Artist Featured: Tjebbe Beekman
Writer: Grace Jamieson Bianciardi
In a world flooded by information, where differing fragments of knowledge can overwhelm an individual’s senses, Tjebbe Beekman’s latest exhibition at GRIMM Gallery in Amsterdam offers a compelling, visceral exploration of hostile strength and the human condition across abstraction. Running from January 17 through March 8 (2025), Glitch marks Beekman’s fifth solo show at the gallery. This exhibition demonstrates the evolution and deep emotional research of the artist’s rich engagement with the painting medium as a form of philosophical inquiry or inspection.
Beekman (born 1972) is no stranger to using his canvases as battlegrounds for both intellectual and emotional discourses. Moreover, the artist’s work invites the viewer into a world where the rules of time, space, and language seem constantly in motion and evolution.
Encapsulating the exhibition’s wider meaning by semi figuratively portraying explorations of different human figures—depicted singularly and within pairs—caught between states of clarity and distortion is standout piece titled The artist is there. This work presents a figure in simple painter’s clothing, where the entangled fingers become the focus of the canvas and allude to a moment of indecision or anxiety. Mirroring these emotions across the fractured forms, dynamic brushstrokes and blooming green, vanishing the figure’s head, the artist speaks to a more profound sentiment— a search for meaning within an elusive and external shifting landscape.
Beekman’s focus on the “dismemberment” of the human form to communicate strong internal emotions, continues in works like Symbiosis XIII. This triptych breaks down the human emotion into a series of enigmatic pieces depicting three differing figures. Elements like floating pom-poms, cream-colored tights, and the vivid use of color, presents a veiled reference to past art genres. These references—to Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso—create a surreal, almost dreamlike atmosphere where the viewer feels both drawn to recognizable forms and detached from the unknown. Moreover, these figures seem to live in a world of their own, with rules that defy logic and forms, and linger between figuration and abstraction. The result of all these elements is a strangely hypnotic feeling of displacement, as if the viewer is transiting across an undefined space.
This disorientation is heightened by Beekman’s use of color and texture. Thick layers of acrylic and emulsion—often mixed with grit or sand—gives the canvas’ surface a sculptural quality. One approach and interpretation to Beekman’s work is the resistance of the canvas impeding the viewer to comprehend the painted scene. The manipulation of the smooth surface to a textural exterior reinforces the underlying tension in his work that exists within the painting and the temporal moment the viewer is experiencing the work.
A key component for this body of work is the influence of philosopher Ignaas Devisch, particularly his concept of the “information epidemic”. Devisch speaks of living in an age where vast amounts of data overwhelm us yet leave us with little clarity or understanding. This sense of overstimulation and confusion is embodied in Beekman’s chaotic, fragmented canvases, where splashes of paint resemble digital glitches or fragmented bytes of data. The paintings themselves become metaphorical errors, an aesthetic reflection of our inability to make sense of the endless stream of information that bombards us daily.
What makes this work pertinent to modern times, is that these “glitches” don’t only speak to the contemporary moment but delve into a timeless concept of human existence. Whilst Beekman actively engages with the visual culture of the past—through references to classical figures and established artists—Beekman’s art presents a threshold to the present suggesting that painting is not only a medium but a language.