Throughout a sculptural practice, Tim Mathijsen investigates how what we understand manifests and transforms itself, and turns into meaning, knowledge and stories. A major part of his practice therefore is dominated by the use of plaster, a highly moldable and adaptable material that Mathijsen utilizes both for its ability to hold any solid shape over time and as an agent that allows him to borrow, copy and repurpose existing designs in order to further draw out the notion that shapes, facts and fiction are ever transferable and subject to transformation. Often elements of existing architecture and interior design appear in his work. by reissuing their historical context, Mathijsen gives these elements and objects new lives within an entirely different context.
The act of copying, or replacing context, is, not entirely innocent. By extracting the image of an object and placing it within a new context, Mathijsen changes its meaning; he erases the actual purpose and usefulness of the object in order to have new ones given to it. This act is similar to what George Bataille called making abundance; as in an animal sacrifice, you take something that is useful to a society and entertain it into something that is no longer useful; bring it into a new conceptual realm.
Very recently, Mathijsen found a series of comic strips, illustrated by his grandfather. From the comic strip, originally a story similar to Kapitein Rob or the Zevensprong, Mathijsen traced the images. He then joined these together, not chronologically, but by type; series of boats, portraits or, say, people walking were joined together and placed in composition. Other images were literally immortalized in frescoes on handkerchiefs.
Tim Mathijsen (1987, The Netherlands) lives and works in Amsterdam, where he studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and attended De Ateliers in 2015. In 2019 he was a resident at Wiels in Brussels, Belgium, where he presented a solo exhibition in the projectroom in 2022. He is the cofounder of Marwan, a collective artist run project space in Amsterdam in addition to teaching at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.
