Jurriaan Lowensteyn operates in a field where the artwork is no longer an answer, but a sustained disturbance. His installations, images, and spatial interventions move beyond discipline, medium, and explanation, situating themselves in a state of permanent provisionality.

Materials are not chosen for what they signify, but for what they resist. Light functions as orienting noise; space as a temporary agreement; form as something that can disappear as easily as it appears. The repeated use of emptiness and silhouette positions the human body not as a subject, but as something structurally absent.

A decades-long proximity to the work and thinking of Ulay has led to a fundamental distrust of interpretation, narrative, and artistic self-explanation. Art does not appear here as discourse, but as a consequence of action, time, and persistence.

Lowensteyn’s work does not ask for interpretation; it endures it — without submitting to it.

 

  • The work of Jurriaan Lowensteyn manifests itself within a discursive landscape in which explanation structurally falls short. His practice cannot be understood as a coherent methodology, but as a series of parallel shifts in which material, light, and space mutually unsettle one another.

    The use of wood, water, glass, metal, and pigment functions neither as a formal language nor as metaphor, but as an operational condition. Light—frequently reduced to directed lasers and reflective interventions—behaves as an unstable factor that activates perception without consolidating it. What becomes visible refuses to carry meaning; what suggests meaning withdraws from fixation.

    Silhouettes, cut-outs, and negative volumes are not carriers of content, but strategies of withdrawal. The body appears, at most, as a structural absence, as a site where interpretation comes to a halt. The viewer is thus not addressed, but quietly implicated.

    A prolonged proximity to the artistic practice of Ulay—not as reference but as daily reality—has left behind a sharp awareness of art as a life practice rather than as the production of meaning. This does not constitute an explanation, merely a context that is itself no more conclusive.

    Lowensteyn’s work refuses clarification. It does not function in order to be understood, but in order to be present.