Public space overflows with images and words demanding our attention. But what comes before a message? A doodle, a sketch, the idle marks in the margins. Dutch artist Lily van der Stokker takes this “visual garbage” and turns it into art.
With Nothing Wall, a 92-meter hand-painted mural, she transforms the construction fence of the future Hartwig Museum into a place of enlarged scribbles, curls and doodles that seem like writing but say nothing at all. Van der Stokker calls this “the scandal of effortlessly painting nothing”—a reminder that nothing can still be beautiful, decorative, fun, photogenic, and even worth stopping for.
Read the text inspired by Nothing Wall, written by Paige K. Bradley.
Lily van der Stokker lives and works in Amsterdam and New York. Since the late 1980s, she has been creating monumental wall paintings and installations composed of decorative ornamentation, furniture, bright colours, everyday objects and texts. Most recently, she has had major institutional solo exhibitions at the Camden Art Centre, London (2022), the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2019), the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2018), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015), the New Museum, New York (2013), and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2010).
Recently she opened her own project space StokkerJaeger in Amsterdam.