Marijke van Warmerdam

Marijke van Warmerdam is internationally renowned for her short films. In the early nineties she made her first non-narrative film loops, which led Daniel Birnbaum to call her the Loop Guru of the eternally flowing present. Together with her photographs and sculptures these form a consistent body of work. With a typically light touch, the work combines a deceptively naïve approach to the act of seeing with straightforward strategies such as dramatic shifts of scale and rhythm, doubling and reflection to urge us to look with our eyes wide open in order to stress that not everything is what it seems. Nowadays she has developed this retinal openness to themes which deal more explicitly with perception.

Born in Holland in 1959, she has lived and worked in New York and Berlin, and is now based in Amsterdam. Her work has featured in numerous important international exhibitions, including the Sydney, Berlin, Kwangju and Venice Biennials, and Documenta X. She has had retrospective exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Migros Museum in Zurich, ICA in Boston, Muhka in Antwerp, MAC in Marseille, The Fruitmarket in Edinburgh and IKON in Birmingham.