BIO
I was born in 1981 in Germany, the only child of two nurses. The first six years of my life were a fragmented sequence of relocations. Ten moves, no roots, no stable friendships, no sibling presence, no structured culture. In hindsight, it wasn't chaos—it was a kind of purification. A cleansing from societal input. The absence of human stability formed an early and radical autonomy of perception.
We lived countercultural, poor, and emotionally adrift. What remained was nature to trust. Silence as pedagogy. I grew up listening more than speaking. Observing more than being seen. There were no books, no artworks, no ideology. Just the raw presence of absence. My only consistent dialogue was with the invisible. This trained me.
After my parents’ divorce, my mother brought me to Belgium. From that point on, life quieted. A certain stability began to emerge—subtle, local, embodied. I spent most of my time at a friend’s house. Their family gave me a reference point I had never known: presence, rhythm, continuity. They didn’t rescue me—but they anchored me, just enough to not drift entirely.
Germany had already done its work. The early instability fractured any potential for conventional socialization. I never learned the choreography of conformity. I arrived late to the theatre of the world—and luckily, never learned the script.
Drawing began not as artistic ambition, but as occupation. As a solitary child, with no toys, no media, and no playmates, I drew because I was alone. Later, people began to admire it. And perhaps that is when I unknowingly began becoming what others told me I was. What we are praised for, we repeat. Praise is often misread as identity. Looking back, I wonder if I became an artist because others saw me as one. Or because drawing was the only language that matched the complexity of the interior world I inhabited.
What shaped me most was not a presence—but its opposite. Absence. Emptiness. Distance. Emotional cold. These are not merely psychological events. They are ontological territories. They train perception. They create access to realms others are too saturated to notice. I developed an acute form of inner sensing. What others call “intuition” became my default interface with reality. I did not have to unlearn societal dogma to find myself. I never absorbed it in the first place.
My being was self-forming. Not out of pride. Out of necessity.
I do not “create art” in the traditional sense. I do not express myself. I do not perform a style. Art, for me, is a natural force. Like gravity. It does not need me—I merely open myself to facilitate it. I become medium, receiver, resonance space. Art is not what I make. It is what passes through me when the conditions are right. The artist is not the originator. The artist is the channel. The artist is not the hero of the work. The artist disappears.
At fifteen, I began formal training at the Robert Schumann Institute in Belgium—20 hours per week across all techniques: photography, drawing, sculpture, design, painting. It was highly technical, structured, demanding. I immersed myself in it. After that, I left the classroom. I worked as a woodcutter and as a pedagogue in nature-based education. Working outside—touching trees, lifting stones, building fires—brought intelligence into my body. Creation had to be physical. I learned to think with my hands.
In 2003, I entered the Art Academy in Maastricht. I chose the Netherlands over Germany because I wanted to master form before deconstructing it. Germany offered me conceptual space. The Netherlands offered me tools. I needed to learn before I could forget. I studied five years. I graduated in 2008.
But the real transformation came in 2007, with the death of my father. A distant man. But something in his death collapsed a structure in me. I abandoned figuration entirely. No more images. No more likeness. No more symbolic play. The work became reduced, stripped, abstract, slow. It became process. It became meditation. I was no longer trying to represent reality—I was attempting to touch its architecture.
My work now exists in a state of tension: between control and surrender, line and void, form and field. It is slow. Monotonous. Repetitive. At times devotional. What others see as aesthetics, I experience as ontological enquiry. I am not designing. I am deciphering. My themes—emptiness, silence, singularity, destruction—are not motifs. They are conditions of being. They are structural realities, not emotional gestures.
Aesthetics matters. Beauty matters. Not for decoration—but for survival. Beauty is food for the soul. Geometry is healing. Symmetry is medicine. The spiritual dimension of form is often misunderstood as design. It is not design. It is alignment.
I live and work in Maastricht. I have two studios. One is small, white, light-filled—a space for drawings, delicate work, breathing. The other is vast, industrial, heavy—a space for physical force, scale, structure. Together, they reflect the dual nature of my being. Stillness and movement. Softness and metal. Thought and act.
I do not believe in the sovereign individual. I believe in the collective organism. Humanity is not a cluster of separated selves. We are organs in a shared body. We are one soul, distributed. My work is not self-expression—it is contribution. I feel a responsibility to make art that is unharmful, precise, necessary. Art that doesn’t scream to be seen, but waits to be found.
In another life, I might have become a healer, a physicist, a monk. But art integrates all these roles. It allows for the simultaneous presence of rigor and devotion. The rational and the spiritual. The inner and the infinite.
My task is not to entertain. My task is to listen to the real—and to give it form. Again and again.
Art is not ornament. Art is architecture for the invisible.