Maartje Stapel is a dutch fine artist based in Amsterdam.
In her most recent work, she uses barren, basic white textiles to answer the question “how can I create an immediate emotional response within the simplest form and materials?"
She names this emotional formality, formal emotionality.
Maartje’s goal is to make work that expresses the urgency move herself. This is why her work is at the same time deeply personal and deeply emotional.
Maartje’s inspiration is the mundane. Her life, her surroundings, the news, a woman in red at the corner of the street, a white wall in a museum, a friend who asks her why she cries so easily. The mundane in expression, expression in the mundane.
Her aim is to create works that will immediately and automatically move her, works that first elicit an emotional response and later ignite meaning. Maartje’s practice investigates the mechanisms of affective primacy; when preferences need no inferences.
Maartje Stapel lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
She recently graduated from the fine arts department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.