Exhibition Present Self by Floor Meijers
PRESENT SELF In Present Self, Floor Meijers presents a selection of layered portraits that combine photography with watercolor, gouache, and digital interventions. The works emerge from an ongoing dialogue between analog and digital imagery, and bear traces of both the physical act of painting and the ephemerality of scrolling and swiping. A significant portion of the works on display is based on images from her smartphone: photos from her own camera roll, screenshots of apps, images sent via WhatsApp, and profile pictures of contacts. In some works, the smartphone itself appears as a subject or as a frame that structures our view. Thus, Floor questions the smartphone as a contemporary mirror: the device with which we record, share, and sometimes lose ourselves.
Floor Meijers
Floor Meijers (born 1980) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and works with photography, painting, and digital media. Her practice centers on portraiture and the complex dynamics of looking: how the camera mediates self-presentation, how the viewer's gaze reshapes what is seen, and how the ubiquity of cameras influences our awareness of ourselves and others. Her source material ranges from intimate portraits of friends and family to images gleaned from dating apps, news media, and archives. By interweaving private and public visual languages, Meijers examines the flood of portraits circulating in everyday life, from advertisements to social media. In addition to painted work, she also develops long-term projects involving documentary photography. Together, her works create a layered investigation into how individuals define their identity in a culture saturated with images, where every act of looking carries weight and consequence.
