Eli De Haas

Born in Rotterdam in 1999, Eli de Haas studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, in the studio of Andreas Schulze. As a painter, Eli de Haas invites us to explore a world from within, via the subterranean and complex channels of affect that silently animate it. Testing our capacity to conceive without understanding, to imagine without seeing or touching, he summons our childlike spirit to feel much more than to make sense. The stories we tell ourselves in front of his images take on the form of dream fragments or fairy tales. Where verisimilitude is secondary, and gravity incidental, where bodies become mountains, where silhouettes are sketched in the shadows of trees, and where each face could be that of the person projected onto it. Without ever trying to pin down a valid reality, by using a free figuration that is sometimes naïve, he tirelessly tries to give it a more lively, denser body. He is the winner of the Makersloket grant from the Droom en Daad Foundation in 2021.