m.simons is pleased to present The Orientation Trip, the second solo exhibition by Joost Krijnen at the gallery. The exhibition brings together a large number of drawings, works produced since 2013. The exhibition opens during the festive Amsterdam Art Week, on November 19, at 5 p.m.
Drawing occupies a central position in Krijnen’s artistic practice. For more than a decade, he has maintained an almost uninterrupted daily routine of drawing: allowing one image to lead to the next. These drawings are not necessarily made with a particular destination in mind. Rather, they emerge from an ongoing search for form, subject, association or anecdote, in which the act of drawing becomes both a way of thinking and a means of discovery.
What makes this practice particularly revealing is the way it relates to the wider body of Krijnen’s work. His paintings, large works on paper, wall paintings, commissioned illustrations and editions can all be understood in relation to this continuous flow of images on paper. They do not simply originate from preparatory sketches, nor are they separate explorations of different media. Instead, they seem to emerge from the same underlying process: a visual language that is constantly being tested, developed and transformed through drawing. The drawings are not studies for the works that follow; they are the ongoing practice from which those works take shape.
In Krijnen’s hands, drawing is less a matter of translating an existing idea into an image than of discovering what an image might become. A line set down almost casually can develop into a face; the face might turn into a mask, the mask into a bird, or something entirely unexpected. Figures shift, objects mutate and compositions find their direction through a succession of intuitive decisions. What begins as a seemingly incidental gesture can develop into a fully realized image, while a carefully constructed drawing may retain the spontaneity of its first mark. This interplay between improvisation and precision, between the incidental and the deliberate, is fundamental to Krijnen’s work.
The exhibition brings together a selection of recent works on paper alongside a number of earlier drawings from Krijnen’s extensive archive, offering a view of the practice that runs beneath and alongside his wider oeuvre. Seen together, these works reveal how motifs, figures and visual ideas recur, change direction and reappear in unexpected forms. They offer a glimpse into the ongoing stream of drawing from which much of Krijnen’s artistic output has emerged.
Joost Krijnen (Breda, 1983) lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied Fine Arts at AKV | St. Joost in Breda from 2003 to 2007 and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam from 2013 to 2014. In 2015, he received both the Koninklijke Prijs voor Vrije Schilderkunst and the De Scheffer Prize. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at m.simons, Amsterdam (2024) FORMATOCOMODO, Madrid (2017) and Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht (2015), among others. His work is held in public and private collections including the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Schunck* in Heerlen, Dordrechts Museum and the Albert Heijn Art Foundation.
