Christian Rex van Minnen

For Christian Rex van Minnen, painting is an introspective process. His surreal canvases channel the raw chaos of thoughts and emotions into elegantly rendered images. Using oil painting techniques inspired by Renaissance and Dutch masters, van Minnen depicts his subjects with a decadent level of detail. His subjects themselves are, however, far from sublime: deformed faces, garish still lifes and disturbingly contorted bodies. Meanwhile, brightly coloured additions such as rainbows, hearts and gummy sweets reflect the influences of contemporary Surrealist-Pop Art. By playfully clashing with their surroundings, these details add a sense of absurdist humour to his artworks. The results are laced with irony – at once hyper-realistic and nonsensical, beautiful and ugly, historic and contemporary.

At the centre of van Minnen’s practice is his creative process: “the most important thing is painting. It’s not the painting.” While painting, he creates the base layers of his artworks with abstract brush strokes that directly translate his emotions into paint. These brushstrokes allow him to release repressed ideas and feelings through the action of painting itself, expunging inner turmoils of the male psyche in twisted yet humorous characters. Ultimately, van Minnen creates provocative artworks that resist easy readings and demand active engagement from their viewer.