Portrait Tim Enthoven

Picture by Boudewijn Bollmann


About Tim Enthoven

Uncomfortable contradictions rest at the heart of Tim Enthoven's drawings, paintings, books and situations. His friendly and humorous images, on closer inspection, reveal disturbing realities; printed images turn out to be hand-drawn, and drawings turn out to be paintings. In his work a revelation is also a covering up, the moral is also immoral, caring is also manipulation, and the neutral is really always specific. Enthoven encounters these contradictions in the systems through which individuals relate to the collective: morality, animal-ethics, social science and architecture. His works are often intuitive responses to the visual representations of these systems: psychic-evaluation forms, ethical worksheets, dog-breed charts, and architectural diagrams. Enthoven employs a range of techniques from watercolors and acrylics to quick photoshop sketches, print and collage. He uses familiar, often domestic, situations and plays with their scale, function, their placement and repetition, in order to create conflict and ambiguity in spatial, linguistic and social hierarchies. His situations function dysfunctionally, and this way manifest the rules that keep them together.

Enthoven studied at the Sculpture Department at Yale University, New Haven. He participated in numerous international exhibitions including The Lisbon Architecture Triennale, TEFAF New York, in The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, in BY ART MATTERS museum in Hangzhou, and in Fons Welters Gallery in Amsterdam. Enthoven has published multiple artist's books and a graphic novel, and for years he has been a regular contributor to The New York Times. He has received multiple awards and grants, including a Plantin Moretus Award, a Prins Bernhard Culture Fund scholarship, a Mondriaan Fund stipend for established artists and an Amsterdam Foundation for the Arts stipend. He lives and works in Amsterdam and Brasilia.


CV