The work of Aukje Koks shows the personal, intimate thought that deals with the behaviours and codes apparent in daily life. The incidental, potentially over-looked and inevitably humanized detail is known to hold a privileged place in her choice of subject matter. Furthermore abstraction is made to mingle with figuration in a lack of admiration for aesthetic hierarchy. Marked by a distinct and diverse provisionality, the work of Koks seeks to deflate the high seriousness generally associated with painting. Koks’ painterly investigations fuel a perpetual motion machine, conflating the real and the imagined. Her oeuvre cannibalizes itself, moving in ever new directions as it rehashes the familiar, dressing it in muted colours and visual and verbal puns, while any kind of coherent whole is fractured into isolated and sometimes joint fragments.
For her second solo show at the gallery Aukje Koks worked without adding whites to her palette, which is normally characteristic for most of her practice. She wanted to create less contrast and to give more depth to the canvases, something in which she succeeded. Koks also managed to soften her paintings by constantly removing paint. It seems that Koks wants the viewer to realize that her work is more about the process of creating, about technique, style and the meaning of a work, than about the concrete object she is referring to.
In the precisely composed paintings images of still objects are brought to movement by the use of repetition, depths, layers and shadows. The paintings provoke a feeling of confusion and fascination, almost like a hallucinatory experience, as the objects seem to be adrift, like the paintings still need to find their final composition. You could say that the practice of Aukje Koks also has a social component. The work Solids, an installation with wallets made out of soap stone, could be seen as a metaphor for a certain part of our capitalist society; each individual object of the installation has a soft appearance but in reality they are cold and solidified.
Aukje Koks (1977) studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2007-2008 and completed a residency at Wiels in Brussels in 2011. She was awarded the Royal Award for Painting in 2005 and the Wolvecamp Prize (the most prestigious Dutch painting price) in 2012. Recent solo shows include: Het Paviljoen, Gent (2013), Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (2012), MOT international, Brussels (2012) and Wiels (2011). Group shows include; Dublin Doubles, Broadcast gallery, Dublin and Voorkamer, Lier (2013), Plus jamais seul, Standards Expositions, Rennes (2013), Time, Trade & Travel, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, A Proper Painting, Nest, Den Haag and Objects of Dismissal, Autocenter, Berlin all in 2012.
