andriesse ~ eyck galerie, Amsterdam
25 March 2023 – 13 May 2023
Solo Exhibition
“In the end, a painting must comprise layers of accumulated images, added together to create a new image … It is a process of redigesting material and ideas.”
– Natasja Kensmil
In spring 2023, Natasja Kensmil presented Les Fleurs du Mal at andriesse ~ eyck. The exhibition brought together a new body of paintings in which Kensmil re-examined the history of the reclining nude and its entanglement with questions of power, colonialism, and representation.
Art historical imagery and iconographic traditions form a central frame of reference in Kensmil’s work. For her, painting is a way of interrogating the past and the narratives that shape historiography. She is drawn to the hidden, the unresolved, and the enigmatic—myths and clichés that surround themes such as power, oppression, war, and loss. By reworking these histories, she adds new, critical layers to our collective memory, shifting familiar images into new and sometimes unsettling directions.
At the core of Les Fleurs du Mal were three large canvases—Odalisk, Muse, and Myth. They reference the long Western tradition of the female nude, and more specifically the 19th-century odalisque, epitomised in the works of Ingres, Manet, and Matisse. While those paintings framed the female body through eroticised and exoticising gazes, Kensmil’s figures resist such projections. Her nudes appear cold, rigid, and lifeless, denying the conventions of sensuality and beauty.
Still lifes with flowers, echoing the 17th-century vanitas tradition, accompanied the figures. Traditionally a reminder of mortality, these flowers also recall colonial histories: many were imported as luxury goods from overseas territories, symbols of wealth inseparable from exploitation. The combination of reclining nude and flower opens multiple readings of the status of the female body today, while at the same time insisting on a confrontation with colonial legacies.
The exhibition title refers to Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), in which the French poet explored beauty, evil, and the dualities that shape human existence. This tension between attraction and repulsion, power and vulnerability, history and the present, continues to define Kensmil’s practice.
oil on canvas
140 x 250 cm
oil on canvas
120 x 100 cm
oil on canvas
120 x 100 cm
oil on canvas
140 x 250 cm
oil on canvas
140 x 250 cm
oil on canvas
120 x 100 cm
oil on canvas
140 x 100 cm
oil on canvas
140 x 260 cm
Catalogue of the exhibition (PDF)