Keijsers Koning is excited to present the works by Popel Coumou, Laura Ortiz Vega and Jack Early. Exploring moments of reflection through interior space, urban architecture and food. These artists use their moment to carve out a reflection on time.
Popel Coumou (1978, Velsen) is a photographer and a visual artist, using mixed media. She graduated from the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, in 2004. She produces alienating photographs of dreamy bedrooms, dusty corridors, deserted office blocks, covered with geometrical forms and taut lines. Human beings are usually absent. Coumou builds two-dimensional collages from paper, carton, fabric and clay, suggesting space by means of perspectives and lighting. She combines the visions of an interior architect and a still life photographer. In 2007, she won along with the American Jessica Roberts the First Prize at the Hyères Photo Festival, Hyères, France. In 2012, she was awarded the Mercure Culture Prize. Coumou exhibited many times, e.g. at Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany, in 2007; at ‘Hyères 2008’, Villa Noailles, Hyères, France; at Torch Gallery, Amsterdam, 2015 (a solo show). Her works are included in Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam; and in Museum Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands.
Laura Ortiz Vega was born in Mexico City in 1975. Motivated by her interest in manual production techniques, she studied industrial design at the Universidad Iberoamericana. She is co-founder of the self-management project for artists Antena Estudio that disseminated and showed the work of traditional Mexican artists along with the work of contemporary artists in various national and international art fairs, such as ZONA MACO in Mexico City, Toronto Art Fair in Canada . Art LA, Pulse Art Fair and Art Chicago among others in the United States. London Art Fair in the United Kingdom and SUPERMARKET in Sweden. At the same time, she has collaborated with other galleries, curators and cultural dissemination projects, inside and outside Mexico. He exhibited for the first time in his career, individually in 2011, at the Lyons Wier Gallery in New York and in 2012, he presented his first individual exhibition in Mexico titled Cosmograffiti, at the Museum of Popular Art in Mexico City, in where he has also participated collectively. Among her other exhibitions, the following stand out: Textual Attraction, at Mary Ryan Gallery, and Material Matters at Lyons Wier Gallery, both in New York. He also participated in The West Collects Initiative Selected Artisits Exhibition in Oaks, Pennsylvania and in 2013, in the Hard Time Mini Mall exhibition, curated by Noah Antieu of Red Truck Gallery in New Orleans, in collaboration with Shooting Gallery of San Francisco and Breeze Block Gallery from Portland. In the same year, she participated in the festival-exhibition Cash, Cans & Candy with the Galerie Ernst Hilger in Vienna. In 2009 she was selected and awarded an Honorable Mention at the Yucatán Visual Arts Biennial. In 2010, she was selected for the Centenario award within ZONA MACO in Mexico City and since 2012, her work has been part of the West Collection of Pennsylvania. She is currently the director of her independent exhibition space located in Colonia Roma.
Jack Early began writing songs, which have become integral to many of his new art objects. Since 2009, he has been making objects that explore the breadth of American pop culture. Glenn O’Brien describes Early as a “new sort of bluesman . . . making work that reflects the lonesome road he’s been on, a road that goes through Jesus, Jesus Christ Superstar, John and Yoko, protest movements, and the United Federation of Planets.”
Jack Early graduated from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Recent exhibitions have included Pop Life: Art in a Material World, Tate Modern, London, 2009–10; Mapping the Studio: Artists from the François Pinault Collection, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2009–11; Jack Early: WWJD, Southfirst, Brooklyn, 2012; Jack Early: Gallery Peace, McCaffrey Fine Art, New York, 2012; Jack Early, Fergus McCaffrey, New York, 2016; and A Better Yesterday, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2017. In 2024 Early had a survey show at the Wilson Arts, NC.
Kris Pierce exhibits his newest editions is an e-ink print created using a hacked Amazon kindle. Through modifying an old kindle, he was able to feed an image into an unplugged screen and freeze his chosen image. E-ink screens work by using “pixels” made up of tiny spheres that are half black and half white. The electronics orient the rotation of the spheres so that they display a value between white and black, giving a gamut of greyscale values. The image you see on the screen is actually created using ink, and will remain permanently locked and displayed on the screen when unplugged, never needing a power source to function. It may feel akin to something like a modern tintype.
