Melle de Boer (Delft, 1972) is a Dutch painter, writer, printmaker, draughtsman and singer-songwriter.
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His painterly process is highly associative. Symbols, figures and idioms he uses are often taken from popular culture and literature. De Boer then applies these figures as abstract elements, repurposes for figures of a completely different nature, or outright disfigures them for visuals puns. Through this process, a lighthouse turns into an abstract form reminiscent of Malevich, two letters P are used for boots and an open umbrella get two handles.

In contrast to his paintings, his drawings and collages are literal and figurative. Cartoonish, mostly in black and white and often accompanied by short texts each individual drawing serves as a windows into De Boer’s original narratives filled with dark humor and slight melancholy.

Melle de Boer graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academie in 1995. His work is in collections such as Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken and Museum Van Bommel Van Dam. In 2025 Museum Rijswijk will present a solo exhibition of De Boer’s work. Further to his career as a visual artist, he is the founder of the band Smutfish, an acclaimed Dutch country-noir band.

Robbin Heyker (b. 1976) his paintings are intentionally legible. By applying painting strokes thinly on a monochromatic background and showing surfaces isolated in the composition, every action can be discerned. It is as if by working in this way, the artist wants to be able to trace the magic of the final canvas in the steps he has taken to do so.

Often the canvases reference postmodern painters such as Daan van Golden, Blinky Palermo or Niele Toroni. By revisiting essential elements of their oeuvre, he engages in the specific games these artists have set up for themselves. Since 2016 on a series of canvases based on birds he has seen as a birdwatcher. Again, the game element is essential; only when Heyker has really seen the bird is he allowed to translate its color combination into an abstract composition.

Robbin Heyker lives and works in The Hague and in Beijing. In addition to his training at the KABK, the artist has done several residencies, including at C-Space (Beijing), New Jörg (Vienna) and CCA Andratx (Mallorca). Recent solo exhibitions showed Heyker at Galeria Alegria in Barcelona (2022) and at Bjorn and Gundorph Gallery in Aarhus (2022). Recent group exhibitions include A Grand Day Out, Kate Projectspace in Amsterdam (2023) and Steps and Moves, a group exhibition with Willem Hussem and Klaas Kloosterboer at Billytown, The Hague (2024).