m.simons proudly presents CLOSER, a solo exhibition by Marieke Zwart. Zwart is a visual artist working with drawings on paper and video. Her practice explores contemporary social themes such as reproduction, care, and community. In her first exhibition at the gallery, two drawing series take center stage: the Bijlmermeer series (2023–ongoing), a body of large collages and works on paper focused on scenes from birth care, and Stekjes (Cuttings), a more intimate series of meditative works that Zwart began in 2022 as a young working mother, on the single day per week she could dedicate to her autonomous artistic practice.
The drawings from the Bijlmermeer series are part of a larger project in which Zwart aims to make the vital and often invisible work of caregivers behind closed doors visible—highlighting it as a model for how we might collaborate and coexist in our society. The project centers on midwife Willemijn Speelman and maternity nurse Joyce Aboagye, who together have provided a significant share of birth care in the Bijlmermeer for over twenty years. Zwart accompanied them during home visits and at a birth at the Amsterdam UMC. With sketchbook and camera, she observed their postures and actions in the warmth of maternity rooms. These captured moments are later translated into large drawings on paper.
In the maternity rooms, Zwart is an outsider—a third person, a witness to both the tenderness and the intensity of maternal care. In the layered drawings of the Bijlmermeer series, she gradually unfolds what she saw. She brings the intimacy of care to the forefront, making deliberate visual choices: cutting away or covering parts of the image with paper. Just as care professionals continuously negotiate physical proximity to their clients, Zwart searches in her work for a balance between closeness and distance—between intimacy and perspective.
The Stekjes series emerged during a period when Zwart had little time for large-scale work. While teaching at two academies and managing family life, she became captivated by the intense color of a small cutting gifted by a fellow artist. The focused attention that eluded her during daily multitasking returned in the studio—through observational drawing, carried out with disciplined precision. Color, light, object, surface, background, distance, and focus: all contained within 40 by 40 cm, between 9:00 and 16:30, on that one day each week she had to herself.
Through the self-imposed constraint of depicting a cutting in the same way each week, Zwart’s direct observations are subtly colored by personal concerns and desires. A twig’s support, a stain, or an object on the table—however formal—hints at the reproductive, feminine condition. While Zwart, in the background of her precious studio hours, tries to ignore her fertility calendar, the cuttings in the foreground slowly grow, almost in parallel with her cycles—one failed and one successful pregnancy.
Both series converge in their themes of reproduction and care, and in their exploration of the boundary between visibility and invisibility. Whereas the Bijlmermeer works are based on video stills and further developed in the studio, the Stekjesare drawn directly from observation. In both, Zwart’s gaze is central—carefully analyzed and dissected in her drawings.
On the occasion of the exhibition, Marieke Zwart has produced a limited-edition etching: everyone can travel (2025, edition of 28). The print is based on a sketch she made during a home visit with Willemijn Speelman to a young mother at an asylum seekers’ center in Amsterdam Southeast. As the visit was not suited to being filmed, but carried an important message, Zwart decided to make the moment more visible through an etching. A percentage of proceeds from each print will go to undocumented mothers in Amsterdam Southeast.
