FONTANA AMSTERDAM
Claudy Jongstra | Gerbrand Burger | Mirte van Laarhoven
AN ENCOUNTER: MATERIALS, NATURE AND TIME
Galerie Fontana is proud to present a special exhibition centred on the work of Claudy Jongstra. Her monumental textile works are far more than compelling objects; they are the result of an integrated practice in which art, ecology, biodiversity and craftsmanship are inseparably intertwined. Through a practice that brings together the care for biodiversity, local ecosystems and centuries-old craft traditions, Jongstra demonstrates how art can contribute to a more sustainable and conscious relationship between humanity and nature.
Alongside her work, Galerie Fontana brings together two artists whose distinctive practices explore related fundamental questions. Mirte van Laarhoven and Gerbrand Burger share Jongstra's fascination with the expressive power of materials, the beauty of imperfection and the continuous transformations that characterise the natural world.
From different perspectives, the three artists engage with contemporary developments in which material, craftsmanship and ecological awareness have once again assumed a central role. Here, it is not only the finished image that matters; process, provenance and the life cycle of materials themselves are integral to the meaning and relevance of the artwork.
They are united by a fundamental trust in the act of making and by the conviction that art can transform the way we see. Rather than seeking to master or merely represent nature, they work with it, revealing its processes and inviting us to rediscover the intrinsic value of the living world. Material is never simply a medium; it carries memory, time and meaning. Wool, wood, earth, pigment and other natural elements tell stories of growth, decay, stillness and interconnectedness.
This exhibition is conceived as a dialogue. Together, the three artists create a space where craftsmanship, imagination and ecological awareness converge. Their works reinforce one another, reveal unexpected connections and invite visitors to contemplate the interplay between humanity, nature and matter, while reflecting on both the vulnerability and the resilience of the world around us.
About Claudy Jongstra
Claudy Jongstra (NL, 1963) is known worldwide for her monumental textile artworks and architectural installations, with organic surfaces and vibrant colours that reflect Jongstra’s masterful innovations in the ancient techniques of wool felting and plant-based dyeing. Claudy Jongstra’s oeuvre, often installed in large public spaces, is also represented within many international museums and institutions as well as private and corporate collections.
For more than three decades, Claudy Jongstra has created textile artworks that reimagine systems of production, driven by a deep respect for the interwoven relations between natural materials, biodiverse ecologies, local communities, and intergenerational knowledge. Committed to the preservation and activation of natural and cultural heritage, Claudy Jongstra’s signature artworks and architectural installations are handcrafted with regenerative wool and biodynamic plant-based colours that revitalize the connection between visual beauty, material quality and ecological vitality.
As Jongstra’s artistic practice expands, so too does the impact on her region. Collaborating with local farms, schools, universities and social initiatives, and drawing on a deep respect for the interwoven narratives of people, land, and tacit knowledge, Jongstra actively reimagines and revitalizes the local landscape from monocultural production toward a more diverse, inclusive, and ecologically-just model.
Jongstra’s oeuvre is included in many international museums as well as private and corporate collections such as the MoMA, NYC; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, NYC; LACMA Museum, Los Angeles; Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden; Limburgs Museum, Venlo; TextielMuseum, Tilburg; Centraal Museum, Utrecht; RISD Museum, Providence; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede; Fries Museum, Leeuwarden; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati; Triodos Bank Art Collection and Akzo Nobel Art Collection. Furthermore, her work has been exhibited at the 7th Architectural Biennale of Sao Paulo, Sao Paolo, Brazil; Museum De Lakenhal; TextielMuseum, Tilburg, NL; 13th Architecture Biennale, Venice, Italy; and the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, NYC, USA.
About Mirte van Laarhoven
Dutch artist Mirte van Laarhoven (NL 1986) explores the subtle interactions between man and nature through creations that blend poetry and eco-responsibility. Her artistic approach is based on meticulous observation of ecosystems and a quest for a more harmonious dialogue with natural elements. Born and raised in the Netherlands, it struck her how deeply the desire to shape nature is rooted in Dutch genes. By embedding herself for longer periods of time in various landscapes, both close to home and abroad, alternative ways to reconnect with our natural environment arose. Her work taps into these pivotal moments where seemingly forgotten senses reappeared.
Working mainly with sustainable materials and organic forms, Van Laarhoven strives to reveal the intrinsic value of landscapes while questioning their fragility and destruction. The process of shaping the work doesn’t emerge in a single movement, but through patience and perseverance, with room for what presents itself during the process. Her works, often immersive and sensory, invite viewers to slow down, listen and reconnect with different forms of life. Her works are often an invitation to be completed by the landscape over time. Her approach demonstrates how art can play a pivotal role in the ecological discourse, inspiring both awareness and action towards environmental sustainability.
Mirte van Laarhoven studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture and the Pratt Institute in New York. She won the NLDelta Challenge with Underwater Forest, she received an honorable mention at the Archiprix 2018 and was awarded a talent grant from Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industries, and a development grand from both Mondriaanfonds, Cultuurfonds and Stichting Stokroos. She is an alumnus of the EKWC ceramic residency program (2021, 2022, 2024) and the Jan van Eyck Academy (2023-2024), and the founder of Living Landscapes.
Mirte’s work has been shown at RADIUS Center for Contemporary Art and Ecology (Delft 2024), Brutus Artist driven playground (Rotterdam 2023), The AkzoNobel Art Foundation (Amsterdam 2023), The IJssel Biennial (Zwolle 2023), The International Architectural Biennial (Rotterdam 2022), Limburg Biennial (Venray 2024), Kunstloc Brabant (LocHal Tilburg 2022), Artphy (Onstwedde 2025), Arts et Jardins festival Haut de France (Amiens 2025), CAN REON festival (Tiana 2025) and Odapark (Venray 2026).
About Gerbrand Burger
Gerbrand Burger (NL 1976) is based in Amsterdam. He grew up in Driebergen, The Netherlands, studied Political Science and Language and Culture of Latin America at Leiden University, fine arts at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and School of Visual Arts and Cooper Union in New York. From 2006-2008 he was a resident at artist institute De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Subsequently he did residencies in Japan, Turkey and the Netherlands, and he worked at Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium, ceramics residency EKWC and Pompgemaal Den Helder.
“I am a sculptor living in a wooden house in Amsterdam that I designed and built myself, across the water from the city centre. I work in a studio coöperative that I built with some friends in the harbor area, with my woodworking equipment and a generous stockpile of seasoned, local wood at hand. I have always loved being in a wood workshop, and now I can be there everyday! I love the process of making, that’s where my visual thinking happens, with my brain extending into my fingers. I really enjoy touching and shaping natural materials and through the making I tell the many stories of trees, transience and our contradictory relation to the living world we are part of.
Wood and clay are the materials I shape to my ideas and I make them into sculptures and objects, often with traits of furniture, including picture frames and vitrines. Visual sources vary from the shape of a puddle in an Irish limestone landscape, a gasket found in an online shop, a cutoff piece from the studio floor. In my outdoor sculptures you’ll find rustic trestles and Donald Judd chair knock-offs rotting in the forest, combined with solid, wooden books and wooden panels in exuberant shapes. I’m using drawing to sketch a rough idea of a sculpture, after which I’m immediately picking up wood and hand tools to draw the work out into the physical world. I’m outsourcing parts of the making to automated cutting or shaping, to feel and see more sharply what working by hand means today. In my practice, I deliberately present ‘the human’ as an equal part of this living world, and why, for this reason, I also embrace the transience of my work through the use of natural and organic materials.
With my initiative Thinking Forest Foundation I’m expanding my work into the forest, forging connections with other makers and thinkers, with trees and with all of the living world.”
Burgers work has been shown in solo presentations at C&H Gallery (Objects From the Outside, Amsterdam, 2016), Kunstvereniging Diepenheim (Unhide All, Diepenheim, 2019), Pitcairn Museum of Contemporary Art (Exhibition Continues Upstairs, Groningen, 2020) and Bellyditcham Project Space (From a River to the Room, 2021, Amsterdam), Galleria Sculptor (Studio Furniture, Helsinki, 2022) and in group presentations at Maison van Doesburg (Coup de Foudre, 2017, Paris), Big Art (2018, Amsterdam) Lustwarande (2024, Tilburg), Kunstverein (2024, Amsterdam) CODA Museum (2024, Apeldoorn) and Malva Museum (2025, Lahti). He worked as scenographer for various theatre productions, for Holland Festival and theatres in the Netherlands, Belgium and the United States. His short films have been show at numerous festivals worldwide. Gerbrand is the founding director of Thinking Forest Foundation and initiator and founding board member of Square 28 studio cooperative in Amsterdam
Saturday 5 September 2026 - Saturday 14 November 2026
For an overview of the available works click HERE
FONTANA AMSTERDAM
OPENING HOURS
Wednesday - Saturday
13.00 - 18.00
For an appointment outside opening hours:
+31 (0)20 22 3 88 33
FONTANA BRUSSELS
Carolein Smit
Carolein Smit’s sculptures inhabit a world where beauty and unease exist side by side. At first encounter, her works seduce through their richness, precision and almost overwhelming attention to detail. Yet beneath their ornamental beauty lies something more elusive: a fascination with mortality, desire, vulnerability and the fragile structures through which we attempt to make sense of the world.
Smit’s visual language recalls the historical cabinet of curiosities — collections in which the rare, the strange and the inexplicable were gathered, classified and displayed in an attempt to bring order to the mysteries of existence. Scientific specimens, anatomical studies, religious imagery and objects of wonder converge in her work, creating a universe that feels at once familiar and profoundly strange.
Her sculptures question our impulse to categorise, to distinguish the beautiful from the grotesque, the sacred from the profane, life from death. What happens when these boundaries begin to dissolve? Smit’s work seems to linger precisely at that point of uncertainty, where order gives way to chaos, where seriousness slips into melodrama, beauty becomes excess, and tenderness can suddenly reveal its darker counterpart.
There is a particular tension in her imagery — an emotional short circuit between attraction and repulsion, innocence and guilt, power and vulnerability. Her figures and creatures appear caught in states of transformation, suspended between becoming and decay. They are fragile, excessive, sometimes frightening, and yet strangely tender.
Drawing on the visual traditions of biblical theology, classical mythology, iconography and vanitas, Smit constructs narratives that move freely between the historical and the fantastical. Her works seem to emerge from another age, yet their questions are deeply contemporary. In a world increasingly shaped by the desire for certainty and control, they remind us of everything that remains unresolved: chance, misunderstanding, desire, mortality.
Perhaps this is where the enduring power of Smit’s sculptures lies. They do not offer answers to the mysteries they evoke. Instead, they invite us to remain within them — to look longer, to accept contradiction, and to recognise beauty in what is fragile, excessive and imperfect.
Her works contain a beautiful ambivalence: images that can frighten us while simultaneously warding off fear. They draw us towards the very things we might instinctively turn away from, transforming the unsettling into something captivating, and the strange into something unexpectedly familiar.
About Carolein Smit
Born in Amersfoort in 1960, Carolein Smit lives and works in Belgium. She studied at the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten St. Joost, specialising in graphics and lithography (1979–1984), and later at the European Ceramics Work Centre in ’s-Hertogenbosch (1996).
Smit’s work is held in numerous international collections, including the GRASSI Museum in Leipzig, the Asante Collection in Basel, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature Paris, Museum Valkhof Nijmegen, Rijksmuseum Kampen and Drents Museum in Assen. She was awarded the Oeuvre Prize of the City of Breda in 2010 and has received numerous grants and scholarships.
Through their extraordinary detail and visceral beauty, Smit’s sculptures occupy a space between wonder and unease. They remind us that beneath every attempt to impose order lies the unpredictable complexity of being alive — and that beauty, like life itself, is always shadowed by its opposite.
FONTANA BRUSSELS
OPENING HOURS
Thursday - Saturday
11.00 - 18.00
For an appointment outside opening hours:
+31 (0)20 22 3 88 33