Nazif Lopulissa (Tiel, 1991) graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam in 2016. His work expresses personal narratives of “migration” with a vocabulary that is at once organic and formal—fusing different painterly traditions.

Exploring a state that he experiences as a cultural “in-between”, Lopulissa sets out to create freedom within this space, where he can explore how he can embody this liminal feeling. Setting out to communicate across cultural borders, he employs techniques and materials drawn from both autobiographical and abstract visual languages. Pushing the boundaries of painting, he both hides and reveals his (family) history—at once erasing and creating possible futures. Harnessing the properties of bleach, his work plays with the tension between what was and what can be, in an attempt to capture the movement between the two.