BorzoGallery, Amsterdam presents The weight of green (and other wavelengths), Wieteke Helden's third solo exhibition with the gallery. On display are twelve paintings from her new series of seventeen works, in which she explores the color green. The opening takes place during Amsterdam Art Week on Thursday 19 November, 5 - 9 pm.

In The weight of green (and other wavelengths), Wieteke Heldens presents new paintings that take the colour green as their starting point. Heldens uses the colour obsessively, and not without reason: green is regarded as a healing colour. ‘Colour, like sound, is a wave that affects our bodies, even for people who cannot see,’ she says. ‘I often try to paint without green, but I rarely succeed. So I need green, and it is even functional in the world we live in.’

Self-imposed rules such as these lie at the heart of Heldens’ work. She approaches each new painting as a mathematical calculation. In this conceptual approach, her admiration for artists such as On Kawara and Hanne Darboven can be recognised. Yet her work retains a strongly personal character through its acceptance of imperfection and chance. It is chance, for instance, that determines where drips form, how many appear and, ultimately, the weight of the canvas.

Finally, she turns the canvas upside down, revealing an image that even she has never seen before. She marks each drip with a red dot, and each dot is given a number. The last act is weighing the work. The weight becomes the title: the endpoint of the calculation.

Wieteke Heldens (b. 1982, Ottersum, the Netherlands) graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2007. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Kunstmuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands and the Saatchi Gallery in London. She has been artist-in-residence in Chongqing, Turin and New York, at ISCP and Flux Factory. Heldens won the Royal Award for Modern Painting in 2013, the O-68 Award in 2017 and the Wynn Newhouse Award in 2022. Her work is held in collections including those of the Akzo Nobel Art Foundation, LAM Museum and Museum Voorlinden. Wieteke Heldens lives and works in New York.