Drawing on draftsmanship, painting, literature, and installations, Michael Tedja's oeuvre erupts into a flamboyant and visually playful whole. His boisterous storms of imagery recall the CoBrA movement of artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam that briefly banded together after World War II. Aiming to banish bourgeois rituals as well as theorizing around avant-garde art, they embraced expressionist spontaneity. But Michael Tedja has taken out the anti-intellectual, his painting is a kind of IQ test. With complementary abstract and figurative visual vocabularies, Tedja’s imagery is expressive and linguistic, full of references and autobiographical elements. This monograph encompasses large-scale paintings and drawings. By constantly recycling and repurposing images, Tedja explores the alterability of meaning within the visual context of globalization.

MICHAEL TEDJA (*1971, Rotterdam) is a leading Dutch contemporary artist. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, where he also lives today. He had solo exhibitions at the Cobra Museum for Modern Art, Centraal Museum Utrecht, Locust Projects in Miami, the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, as well as numerous international group exhibitions.