Ties Ten BOSCH

Ties Ten Bosch is a Dutch contemporary conceptual and visual artist, graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Following a decennium of active involvement with the B.A.D. foundation in Rotterdam, he now lives and works between Berlin in Germany and 's-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands. His practice encompasses individual art projects, which have been exhibited internationally, including in New York, Miami, Paramaribo, Douala and Berlin, as well as collaborations within various art collectives.

A key aspect of his artistic process is his proactive and direct engagement with audiences. This interaction forms a consistent thread throughout his work, in both his solo projects and the collectives he is part of, such as Volksrekorders, hOUTSKOOL and If Paradise Is Half As Nice. He believes that it is crucial for artists to adopt a connective and exploratory role in order to draw viewers into a collective dialogue. His artistic practice is marked by a wide variety of materials and forms. Although his work often defies categorisation, a keen observational skill and a consistent investigative approach tie everything together. In many ways, this reflects an anthropological mode of inquiry that focuses on context, behaviour and the subtle construction of meaning in everyday life. Through his work, he aims to share his personal perspective and create a space for interaction and reflection, in which to explore the social, the poetic and the overlooked.

The work of Ties Ten Bosch begins with a sense of wonder and an endless fascination for the unnoticed and overlooked details of urban life. Peeling posters, birds circling manhole covers, discarded rubbish and the worn surface of a concrete slab behind a shopping centre are all fragments that are often ignored yet form the foundation of his artistic practice. Seeing himself as an amateur anthropologist, he is curious about how meaning, behaviour and traces manifest in everyday life and tell stories about the people moving through these urban environments. By using imagination and techniques such as juxtaposition, exaggeration and contrast, he transforms these ordinary elements into visual poetry. Rather than providing ready-made answers, his work invites to pause, reflect and ask questions. It embraces ambiguity and aims, above all, to spark wonder.

He views his work as a space where the everyday meets the poetic and the political. The transient traces of urban environments convey narratives and frequently expose concealed societal or emotional layers. During the pandemic, he was inspired by neglected street posters in Berlin. Peeling and half-detached, they became the inspiration for his series, 'Skins of Berlin' (2020). In this series, he combined these posters with monochrome oil paintings, detaching them from their original meaning and elevating them to the status of sculptural objects. Similarly, his work 'Some Other Memory' (2019) explores how a single event can be remembered in radically different ways by those who experienced it. As with all his projects, these works are deliberately open to interpretation, enabling each viewer to find their own meaning. He firmly believes that this openness is one of art's greatest strengths, in that it has the capacity to raise questions and create space for multiple truths.