In the project space Liesbeth Bijkerk (Hollandia, New Guinea 1957) has produced an installation of her works on paper from recent years. The works vary considerably in terms of size (from 10 x 15 cm to 90 x 150 cm) but they all share a certain visual richness. Liesbeth Bijkerk makes use of a wide range of techniques and materials. She works with watercolor and gouache, oil or acrylic, mixes pigments into rabbit glue and allows ecoline ink to flow across a ground of pastel. In her abstract compositions a play of lines often brings the eye to a halt, then leads it into a space of layered, transparent bands of color. Bijkerk has discovered, by trial and error, the effects that she is able to achieve with various materials. Though attaching great importance to experimentation and the unexpected, she also wants give her visual elements a precise and well-considered place in the composition. The way of working that she has developed over the past years complies with this outlook. Intuitively Bijkerk works toward an atmosphere that defines her work: an aggregate of experiences, moods and images that have their origins in music, visual art or nature. But then comes a second phase, in which she judges and weighs the result; at this point she often cuts the work into segments, which begin to function as independent artworks or, in fact, become part of an even larger whole. Then she pastes them and shifts them around until a new balance has been found, assembling the work as though it were a puzzle. Sometimes the individual ‘building blocks’ are scarcely visible. Where they do stand out, they have the appearance of healed wounds, as Esther Darley writes in the exhibition catalogue, and the paintings ultimately become subtle collages.