Piet Dieleman, Kees Smits: 21 February – 21 March 2026

Kees Smits Piet Dieleman Audio Persbericht (PDF)Press Release (PDF)

Slewe Gallery is pleased to announce a duo exhibition featuring work by Kees Smits and Piet Dieleman. Both artists work in the tradition of fundamental painting and made a name for themselves in the 1980s at Galerie Van Krimpen in Amsterdam.

Smits, originally from Zeeland, has lived and worked in Amsterdam since his student days. He creates large-scale installations with multiple geometric abstract panels that depict the flat Dutch landscape from different perspectives. Dieleman, also born in Zeeland, lives and works in Middelburg. His abstract geometric paintings focus on the six colors of the spectrum, as well as the corresponding scale in gray tones. He also creates graphic work on paper with prints of plants from nature.

In this exhibition, Smits, now eighty years old, presents his new polyptychs in which the motif of letters and punctuation marks plays a more prominent role, reflecting his love of experimental and typographic poetry. Dieleman will show a large diptych from his 'Spectrum' series and a group of new prints of plants from his 'Herbarium' series.

Kees Smits (born 1945, Kortgene) rose to prominence in 1975 with his participation in the Fundamental Painting exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1990, he held a retrospective of fifteen years' work at the Centraal Museum, for which he was awarded the Sandberg Prize. His work is held by various museum collections, including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Centraal Museum Utrecht, and Schunck Museum Heerlen. Smits has exhibited regularly at Slewe Gallery since the gallery's start in 1994.

Piet Dieleman (born 1956, Arnemuiden) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Rotterdam. He has exhibited at various venues including the Vleeshal in Middelburg and the Muhka Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp. His work is held in various public collections, including the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Kunstmuseum The Hague, the Van Bommel-van Dam Museum, the Groninger Museum, the Dordrechts Museum, MUKHA Antwerp, the Zeeuws Museum, as well as the Bouwfonds, ABN AMRO, and AMC.
Piet Dieleman is exhibiting for the first time at Slewe Gallery.

Ruud Kuijer, Spring Sculptures: 17 January – 14 February 2026

Ruud Kuijer Audio Press Release (PDF)

Slewe Gallery is pleased to open the New Year with an exhibition with new works by Dutch sculptor Ruud Kuijer (*1959). Kuijer, who will have a presentation of his sculptures at the Rietveld Pavilion in the famous sculpture park of the Museum Kröller-Müller this coming summer, will show a series of seven new steel sculptures, the so-called Spring Sculptures (Veerbeelden).

In 2023, Ruud Kuijer began what became a series of seven sculptures. For years he had been searching for a way to use the spring - made of iron, yet flexible - in an expressive manner within his sculpture. The results of this exploration can now be seen at Slewe Gallery.

According to Ruud Kuijer: ‘The arrangement of the geometric steel elements appears free and loose. Each has its own direction. They turn away from one another rather than seeking each other out. They remain themselves. Where they touch in passing, a weld has been made. The spring is a contrasting, almost organic form that is part of the whole - apparently in a relaxed manner. Yet the spring is trapped within the seemingly coincidental arrangement and is under enormous physical tension. The Spring Sculptures are “doubly” concrete: they are not only concrete, physically present sculptures; they also address actual physical force.’

Kuijer is known for his series of large concrete sculptures along the banks of the Amsterdam Rijnkanaal in Utrecht, the so-called Waterworks. For these casts he used plastic water related objects, such as rowing boats and surf boards. The forms of these objects are stacked and linked into his abstract assemblages. The artist considers concrete a sustainable material and a modern variant of bronze. In addition to concrete, he also works in iron, as recently in his I-beam sculptures and now in these spring sculptures.

Kuijer lives and works in Utrecht. He studied at the Koninklijke Academie voor Kunst en Vormgeving in Den Bosch and the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. His works are collected internationally by private and public collections, such as Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Kunstmuseum The Hague, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Museum Beelden aan Zee in Scheveningen. Recently, in 2024 he made an exhibition with his sculptures in dialogue with chairs by Gerrit Rietveld in Centraal Museum Utrecht.