REZI VAN LANKVELD: PREMONITIONS

PETZEL is pleased to present Premonitions, an exhibition of new paintings by Amsterdam-based artist Rezi van Lankveld, opening Thursday, October 30, 2025.

October 30 – December 20, 2025

The show marks van Lankveld’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view through December 20, 2025, at 520 West 25th Street.

Rezi van Lankveld begins each painting by formulating custom mixes of oil paint, followed by series of gestures, which embody a push and pull of routine, rebellion, revision, and reprise. She refines her oils to resemble the viscosity of house paints, which she then pours over the canvas and lays down with brushstrokes. Throughout the process, she seeks to discover in the cascade, the placement of pigment, and the blurring and bleeding of edges, an intimate picture with intensity.

This intensity is less about representation than about sensation—what Deleuze described as forces that traverse the body, breaking down the habits of recognition. In van Lankveld’s canvases, pigment becomes a site of potential, where blurred contours and stratified surfaces resist easy resolution. Forms appear and dissolve in a continual state of becoming, vibrating between familiarity and strangeness. The paintings channel an affective charge, not to anchor meaning but to release it, staging encounters with the unknown that feel at once fragile, forceful, and inexhaustible.

For the artist, the alchemy and movement unfurling in the moment falls into place through a flicker of intuition: “like calligraphy it has to be right at once, in one gesture, if it’s not, then I take it away.” As the canvas builds in sheets of paint, like layers of sedimentary rock, she sands the composition down, often repeating her steps for weeks at a time. Evidence of the artist’s hand ripples across her worked surfaces, archives of each action, decision, instinct. With these actions of layering and unearthing, van Lankveld creates entrances for the viewer, unveiling narrative possibilities through a dream-like logic.