BIG ART Rotterdam 2026
janinebeangallery presents Marie Louise Elshout
11–13 September 2026
Codrico Fabriek, Rotterdam
Hunters at Dawn · Building 3 · Section B · No. 3.24
From 11 to 13 September 2026, BIG ART will take place in Rotterdam for the first time. For its twelfth edition, the special exhibition moves into the historic Codrico Fabriek on Katendrecht. More than one hundred large scale works in painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, light art, video, and installation will enter into a direct dialogue with the raw industrial architecture of the former factory complex.
At BIG ART, janinebeangallery will present the Dutch artist Marie Louise Elshout with her multipart work Hunters at Dawn.
Hunters at Dawn unfolds across four canvases at a threshold between night and day, dream and reality. A luminous birch grove forms the setting. Turquoise, intense greens and an almost artificial neon pink loosen the landscape from purely naturalistic representation, placing it in a state somewhere between familiarity and disquiet.
At the centre of the work, we see two girls wearing hare masks. Their white dresses and animal masks initially give the scene a fairy-tale quality, almost playful in appearance. Only with prolonged looking does a small hare become visible, hanging from a string. This detail changes the psychological temperature of the painting. Beneath its luminous surface, questions of vulnerability, control and violence begin to emerge.
This gradual shift is characteristic of Marie Louise Elshout’s visual world. Fairy tales, mythology, folklore and superstition function as forms of cultural memory: familiar images through which experiences of fear, power, transformation, care and threat have been transmitted across generations. In Hunters at Dawn, these motifs enter a contemporary visual language whose meaning remains deliberately fluid.
The girls wearing hare masks embody an ambiguity that runs throughout Elshout’s practice between human and animal identity. A mask transforms, protects and conceals at the same time. It makes the boundary between human and animal permeable, opening a space in which roles and relations of power become less stable than they first appear.
Art historically, this visual world resonates with a long tradition of the fantastic and the uncanny. From Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco de Goya through Symbolism to the psychologically charged imagery of Paula Rego, fairy tales, hybrid beings and familiar narratives have repeatedly provided artists with a means of addressing aspects of human experience that resist straightforward realism. Elshout neither illustrates nor quotes this tradition directly. Instead, she develops a contemporary symbolic language in which the fairy tale continues to function as a form of cultural memory.
The forest itself assumes a particular role within this language. It is both setting and psychological space. The almost fluorescent pink spreading across the forest floor intensifies this ambiguity. For Marie Louise Elshout, it refers to the artificial world humanity has created. Within the natural environment, the colour becomes a sign of contemporary ecological displacement: seductive in its luminosity and disturbing in its artificiality.
This tension between nature and human intervention is also present in the material construction of the work. Pencil and charcoal meet acrylic and oil, while actual leaves become part of the painted surface. Drawing and painting remain visibly intertwined. Nature therefore enters the work both as image and as physical material.
From a distance, Hunters at Dawn unfolds as an approximately 4.5-metre-wide forest landscape. At close range, its apparent unity gives way to lines, layers of colour, traces and details. This shifting perception is central to the work: meaning emerges gradually and changes with the duration of looking.
Hunters at Dawn thus preserves the openness characteristic of Elshout’s practice. Beauty and unease, familiarity and estrangement, nature and artificiality remain closely connected. The painting offers no final resolution. Instead, it occupies a space in which the fairy tale retains its psychological force while opening onto distinctly contemporary questions about our relationship with nature, power and vulnerability.
Visiting BIG ART on Katendrecht
BIG ART Rotterdam takes place at the historic Codrico Fabriek on Katendrecht, between Fenix and the Nederlands Fotomuseum. Rijnhaven metro station is within walking distance.
Marie Louise Elshout · janinebeangallery
No. 3.25 · Building 3 · Section B
BIG ART Rotterdam
11–13 September 2026
Daily from 11 am to 6 pm
Codrico Fabriek
Veerlaan 19
3072 AN Rotterdam
The Netherlands
For further information about the work and its availability, please contact janinebeangallery.