Size:
160×126 cm
Year:
2025
Series:
The Visitor
About the artist
Rooted in materiality and emotion, van den Broek’s practice transforms decay into revelation, challenging us to see beauty not in permanence, but in what persists after collapse.
The Couple
Aldo van den Broek
160×126 cm
Acrylics, soil, roots and gravel path stones on fabrics, mesh wire, cardboard and paper on bubond on aluminium frame
Aldo van den Broek is a self-taught artist whose work explores themes of decay, transformation, power, and identity. Shaped by life on the margins, he is drawn to entropy—the collapse of systems. For him, decay fuels renewal, revealing resilience in unstable environments.
Using discarded materials—such as cardboard, wood, metal, and fabric—his process of layering, scraping, and rebuilding reflects cycles of destruction and regeneration. These materials bear the marks of time, symbolizing both fragility and the potential for transformation.
Through his work, van den Broek challenges institutional, political, and social systems by exposing the vulnerabilities of the people within them. His figures, emerging from textured surfaces, embody the impermanence of identity, shaped by external forces and internal conflict.
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"I’m more drawn to what happens when identity is shaped by a system - institutions, architecture, roles. Sometimes a face appears, or a figure. But mostly they aren’t portraits. They’re functions."
The Visitor
The Visitor delves into the complexities of transforming identities- as artists, as a man and a woman, as a couple, as a new family. A curated dialogue between Van Den Broek’s layered paintings and Hauser’s abstract photographs, The Visitor is an expression of their identities in flux through shifting memories and relationships. Although both artists maintain completely separate practices and approaches, The Visitor also demonstrates that they do not operate in a creative vacuum; at times, boundaries between self and other, presence and absence, are blurred. ‘It’s equally about the harmony as much as the friction of two perspectives colliding.’ It’s freedom and safety, it’s escapism as well as domesticity, a push and a pull -the duality of life expressed in duo.
Van den Broek (1985) and Hauser (1997) are Amsterdam-based artists who are partners in life and occasionally collaborate as an artist duo. Their works are included in Dutch, German, US and Japanese institutional collections and leading private collections in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, US and UK. Both artists have exhibited widely, with shows across the Netherlands, Berlin, London, New York, Taipei, and Tokyo.