OPENING Friday, November 7, 2025, from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM
Antoine Adamowicz rediscoveres the urgency of painting
Amsterdam – For artist Antoine Adamowicz, the exhibition Look Twice at WG Kunst marks a renewed artistic phase. After a period of silence, he rediscovered the urgency of painting – a discipline that gains new meaning precisely in times of digital abundance.
From Economics and Dot-com to Canvas
Adamowicz is not only a visual artist but also a graduated economist. This dual background – rational thinking versus intuitive imagination – forms a constant tension in his work. After his education at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, he was awarded the Buning Brongers Price for Young Painters and received the Royal Award for Modern Painting from Queen Beatrix.
However, his artistic career did not follow a straight line. In the years following the turn of the millennium, he worked in the fast-growing world of digital media and marketing, and later as a marketing lecturer at Windesheim University of Applied Sciences in Almere. “With a young family, I opted for peace and routine,” he says. “The urgency of art seemed to have vanished. I gave up my studio and thought that painting had had its day.”
The Return of Urgency
Yet, the desire for the canvas slowly returned. Tentatively at first – during holidays, as relaxation – but eventually with full conviction. “For a long time, I thought that painting no longer had an impact in an age of screens, games, and algorithms. But it is precisely now that I see its necessity again. In a world of endless virtual images, painting offers something radically simple and real: paint, canvas, and attention.”
For Adamowicz, this is the core of his work: painting as an exercise in attention. “A good painting does something to your gaze. It invites you to slow down, to truly see. That experience of concentrated attention – what we now call mindfulness – is what brought me back to painting. Ultimately, it’s not about the painting itself, but about what it activates in the viewer.”
Structures and Silence
In Look Twice, Adamowicz displays new work in which structures and patterns are central. The repetition creates order and balance, but those who look longer discover movement, layering, and subtle shifts. “The absence of representation (the painting does not depict anything), challenges the imagination. Room is created for association and contemplation.”
The pattern that recurs in his recent work dates back to his earliest paintings from the nineties. “Back then, I used a homemade stencil with spray paint. That same motif now forms the basis again. In a sense, I start every painting with the same structure as a foundation – but always with a different intention and thus outcome. For me, painting is about life itself: about structures that we conform to or try to break free from. Beauty lies in that tension.”
Material and Colour
Tension and beauty are also present in Adamowicz’s use of material and colour. To paint his canvases, he uses his own recipe consisting of a mixture of oil paint with egg yolk and water. This technique seems to give the colours a life of their own, allowing the paintings to be experienced with a new gaze every time.
About the Exhibition
LOOK TWICE! is a duo exhibition by Antoine Adamowicz and Jochem op ten Noort, two artists who have known each other since 2006. While their previous collaboration Backbeat revolved around expression and rhythm, the focus now is on stillness and attention.
OPENING Friday, November 7, 2025, from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM
Open Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 November, 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Stichting WG Kunst, Marius van Bouwdijk Bastiaansestraat 28, Amsterdam