Dutch artist Kinke Kooi interrogates bodily autonomy and the politics of otherness in her intricate drawings and mixed-media works on paper. Her surreal imagery, skillfully rendered in a distinctive pastel palette with an obsessive attention to detail, lingers in spaces historically coded as private, minor, or unspeakable. Kooi dismantles binaries—male and female, inside and out, high and low, ornament and function, good taste and bad—that have long organized and controlled our minds and bodies. Figures dissolve into architecture, plants into animals, bodily cavities become rooms or stages, and the ornamental and essential occupy the same charged line. Found objects like costume jewelry, buttons, or shells are embedded directly into her compositions; these elements celebrate decoration, long subordinated as a feminine concern. Small handwritten notes are threaded throughout and function as a key to the work’s hidden logic. Her use of language is a poetic interrogation of gender-specific experience, laced with humor and resistance, embedded in interior, domestic worlds where ideas and objects accumulate meaning together.

Kinke Kooi (b. 1961, Leeuwarden, Netherlands; lives and works in Arnhem, Netherlands) studied at the Academy for the Visual Arts in Arnhem. The artist has had solo exhibitions at the CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France; the National Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic; the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, Netherlands; and the Museum of Modern Art, Arnhem, Netherlands. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany; CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France; MO.CO Montpellier Contemporain, France; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Netherlands; Centraal Museum, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT, among other venues. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Arnhem Museum, Arnhem, the Netherlands; Rijksmuseum Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands; the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, the Netherlands; and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY.