WOODY VAN AMEN: The Planets

The Planets comprises a new series of paintings in which Van Amen recasts the planets of our solar system as the forces that actually orbit contemporary life. A single crouching figure, rendered again and again in shifting colour, braces beneath a sphere in each canvas — a Bitcoin coin, a mine-like satellite, a missile, a football — as if holding up the sky.

Playful in palette and mythic in pose, the series is Van Amen's own cosmology of the twenty-first century: money, technology, conflict, and spectacle, reimagined as the planets we now orbit.

"He still works daily from the same Rotterdam studio he moved into in 1964, continuing to produce new work six decades on."

Born in Eindhoven in 1936, Van Amen studied at the Rotterdam Academy (now the Willem de Kooning Academy), where he later taught from 1970. In 1959 he produced what were then considered the world's longest paintings — abstract works painted onto barrel-organ books. Two formative years in New York from 1961 to 1963 brought him into contact with Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and the emerging pop art movement, an encounter that shaped his lifelong practice.

Back in the Netherlands, Van Amen became one of the country's foremost pop artists, incorporating familiar Dutch consumer brands into his early paintings before turning to assemblage — building works from found, everyday objects. His practice has long returned to certain motifs, among them the silhouette of the Matterhorn and the "taxat," his signature stacked-cross form.