Artist: Marijn van Kreij

Pale Horse presents a solo exhibition of Dutch artist Marijn van Kreij (b. 1978, Middelrode). Living Together explores van Kreij’s sustained engagement with appropriation, repetition, and the immediate interplay between image and language, situating the artist’s studio as a site of encounter, experimentation, and image-production.

At the centre of the exhibition is a new work by the artist based on a 1977 Newsweek cover featuring an illustration by Edward Koren under the heading ‘Living Together’. The magazine had been lying around van Kreij’s studio for many years, quietly asserting its presence and direct relation to a much earlier collage made in 2016. For van Kreij, the studio is a space in which images linger, resurface, and dialogues and connections are formed over time. In this pairing, the notion of living together works on multiple registers; as domestic coexistence and as social and political arrangement. The second, earlier collage, features a quote from French poet Paul Valéry:

“Living together is something very special. In reality complete being is double, since consciousness assumes a duplication; that I talk to myself and give answers, that I am two persons in one.”

Here, the initial, simple definitions of Living Together begin to expand, suggesting a continual dialogue within the self in which each individual occupies two internal positions. Two modes of consciousness that remain in constant relation.

This theory of doubling resonates both conceptually and visually with the formal structure of van Kreij’s works. Appropriation, repetition, and duplication have long-remained core tenets of the artist's investigation into image-making. By working with existing images, copied, re-drawn, partially obscured, or collaged, van Kreij consistently positions authorship itself as a form of coexistence; a shared position rather than a singular claim. Sourcing material from books, magazines, and films, van Kreij’s references range widely. Through visual cues the artist succinctly acknowledges both the legacy of images and the presence of another maker, and in this way, the act of making becomes an act of ‘living together’ with the existing visual world. Significantly, the Dutch word for appropriation, toeëigening, is directly related to iets je eigen maken—literally “to make one’s own,” but also meaning internalization, learning, or embodying—thereby subtly framing appropriation not merely as an act of taking, but as one of absorbing, inhabiting, or making something part of oneself.

The studio itself is a site of co-existence. Images, ideas and references abound; they overlap and co-mingle and are activated and re-activated across time. An entirely new space or dimension is made by the artist when two pre-existing images or ideas come together to create something new. The works borne out of these relationships are intimate drawings, paintings and collages that appear modest or casual: fragments of text, cartoons, art-historical reproductions and painterly gestures combined. Elements placed beside one another, through juxtaposition or combination, generate new meanings through proximity.
The apparent simplicity of van Kreij’s work is highly deceptive. As curator and writer Steven ten Thije has noted, their haphazard appearance is the result of a concentrated process of looking, thinking and feeling. These works operate as “miniature visual poems”, in which the artist manages to viscerally dissect ideas and theories concerning our general condition. Living Together brings together works spanning nearly two decades, situating van Kreij’s reflective and often humorous works within broader questions of authorship, perception and that which constitutes our shared reality. Van Kreij’s work is subtly provocative; visual puns and oblique combinations subliminally suggest that our reality is both fragile and provisional, albeit poetic.

Le monde est à vous. Le monde est à nous.
[The world is yours. The world is ours]

Marijn van Kreij (1978, Middelrode, Netherlands) is an artist based in Tilburg, he teaches at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and is part of the multidisciplinary artist collective it is part of an ensemble. Recent solo museum exhibitions include How to Look at a Spiral, De Pont Museum, Tilburg (2024); Contemporary Presences: Marijn van Kreij, Museu Picasso, Barcelona (2020) and Nude in the Studio, Marres, Maastricht (2018). In 2025 it is part of an ensemble had an exhibition at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen.

Van Kreij’s work is held in several public collections, including, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht; Centraal Museum, Utrecht; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich and De Pont Museum, Tilburg.