by Alison Hugill // May 12, 2025
The Rijksakademie in Amsterdam will open its doors again this spring for the annual Open Studios event, which starts during Amsterdam Art Week and runs from May 22nd to 25th. Throughout the long weekend, artists-in-residence will share what has emerged from a period of experimenting, researching and producing new work—some of them already in their second year in the prestigious program, which supports around 50 artists at a time. Located in a former cavalry barracks, the artists’ studios are spacious and light-filled, and each atelier has taken on the distinct aesthetic of its occupant.
We visited the Rijksakademie ahead of the Open Studios to check out what some of the residents are up to. Below are some of the stand-out artists to visit at this year’s event.
Ada M Patterson
ampatterson.com
The 1966 novel ‘Wide Sargasso Sea,’ by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys, partly informs the conceptual backdrop of Ada Maricia Patterson’s current works-in-progress at Rijksakademie. The narrative—a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s novel ‘Jane Eyre’—foregrounds the point of view of the protagonist’s wife, Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress, and details her youth in Jamaica and unhappy marriage to the British nobleman, Mr. Rochester. With her many-scaled works featuring the “hammeress in disgrace,” Patterson alludes to characters like Antoinette, and Brontë’s “madwoman in the attic,” who have been pathologized and isolated by white, patriarchal society. In her studio, the artist is working on a series of larger-scale paintings on silk featuring the hammeress, which focus on themes of survival and rage. The figure of the headless woman here represents a universal image of violence, emanating from those who are regarded as “too much.” In addition to this, during her residency Patterson has been working on a series of drawings for an exhibition that took place at Leslie Lohman Museum in New York, entitled ‘The Plural of He,’ which honors the life and work of Trinbagonian writer and activist Colin Robinson, who is lauded as a godfather of the LGBTQIA+ movement.
Ada Patterson: ‘the hammeress in a state of disgrace,’ digital video, 2024 // Courtesy of the artist & Copperfield, London
Eniwaye Oluwaseyi
instagram.com/eniwaye_seyi
Nigerian artist Eniwaye Oluwaseyi is a self-taught painter who works primarily from visual memories and intimate photographs of family and friends. In his studio, inspirational stills from Jean Cocteau’s 1932 avant-garde film ‘The Blood of a Poet’ hang on the walls, next to his canvasses, which feature people sitting or standing in portrait-style arrangements, often in surreal surroundings. The Cocteau film points to an artistic interest of Oluwaseyi’s: examining the dissolution of personal identity through the introduction of surreal elements into more classical portraiture. A Nigerian woman with albinism appears in many of Oluwaseyi’s paintings, contrasting the mostly Black figures but still representative of his home country—a fact that he describes as challenging for her, as a member of a marginalized community within Nigerian society. Oluwaseyi has featured other members of the albino community in different works, as a gesture of inclusion as well as a commentary on the African-American or European experience of underrepresentation within the art historical canon, in contrast to Oluwaseyi’s own visual experiences growing up in Nigeria.
Eniwaye Oluwaseyi: ‘Across the wheel,’ 2024, oil on canvas, 150 x 200 cm // Photo by Eniwaye studio
Sallisa Rosa*
instagram.com/sallisarosa
The walls of Brazilian artist Sallisa Rosa’s studio at Rijksakademie show process sketches and clothing prototypes of a curious creature she refers to as the “rato-cego” (rat-bat). A mythical figure drawn from her own memory as a child, the rat-bat represents a hybrid creature, a rat with wings, that the artist recalls seeing once, but has never been able to verify as truly existing. As a metaphor for adaptation and fluidity, the rat-bat became a central character during Rosa’s residency, for which she developed elaborate costumes and attempted to choreograph anatomically-correct movements. On the opposite wall from the rat-bat sketches, Rosa displays a mind-map of her “global hydrological model,” a project that aligns more directly with her previously exhibited work on collective memory, from the perspective of both the earth and, in this case, the water. Combining scientific and artistic research, Rosa considers the profound effects of climate change and resource extraction on bodies of water. Simple watercolors of blue circles lie on the floor beneath the taped-up maps and articles, detailing aquifer systems and notes on irrigation water required for the production of various crops. Nearby, some familiar clay balls of varying sizes, peeking out from cardboard boxes, remind me of impressive images I’ve seen of her 2023 solo show ‘Topography of Memory’ at Pinacoteca de São Paulo.
Sallisa Rosa: ‘ratbat,’ 2024 // Photo by Pétala Lopes
Jessica Wilson
jessicasarawilson.com
Lately, New York-based artist Jessica Wilson has been repurposing taxi tops from her city, removing their original advertisements and reanimating their lights with her own protocols. In her studio at Rijksakademie, a pink-hued taxi top hangs on the wall directly in front of her door, appearing like a marquee or display without any particular message. Wilson showed this series in a duo show at diez in Amsterdam last year, with Will Thompson, entitled ‘Dream State,’ which points to the oneiric quality of the pieces, removed from their functional purpose. With the taxi top series, she continues her research into urban lighting and its significations. Wilson’s practice otherwise often consists of computer-generated animations and 3D-rendered flat works, examining everyday mediation through screens and our tactile relationship to them. In a recent computer-generated animation, ‘Perfectly Clear,’ shown in London last year, Wilson displays 23-minutes of a disembodied hand, trying to clean a dirty window, using various tools and methods. On the floor below the makeshift marquee in her studio, printouts of film stills featuring CGI explosions form a pile of inspirational visuals for her works-in-progress. In a recent interview, Wilson remarked that she feels strongly about “using CGI a bit differently.” Not looking to replicate Hollywood visual effects, she adopts a more poetic or somatic approach, hoping to break habitual responses to viewing CGI.
Jessica Wilson: render for Rijksakademie Open Studios 2025
nora aurrekoetxea etxebarria
noraaurrekoetxea.com
With the exception of a wooden model of a stairwell, lying on its side in the corner of the room, and a few small sketches of a similar stairwell mounted on the wall by the entrance, Basque artist nora aurrekoetxea etxebarria’s studio at first seems quite bare. That is, until the artist points out the many small interventions she has enacted on the concrete floors and windowed walls of the space. Holes and indents left by previous residents during the process of their creation are highlighted by aurrekoetxea etxebarria, as she casts minuscule sculptural objects from their negative imprint. When I visit, some of them are still inside the holes on the floor, creating a shiny metallic, dotted effect here and there, while others have been removed from the holes and placed on display on the windowsill. Focusing on relational space and the architecture of the domestic, aurrekoetxea etxebarria’s practice is fuelled by this kind of gesture. In addition, she often creates “soft sculptures” out of domestic objects, like mattresses, curtains or towels. As I leave the studio, I notice a towel folded in the shape of a swan and some bubble wrap taped together in its center and fanning outward. Objects that I didn’t initially realize were works suddenly make me want to stay: what else might I discover subtly embedded (quite literally) within these walls?
nora aurrekoetxea etxebarria, Rijksakademie 2025 // Courtesy of the artist and Rijksakademie
*Due to circumstances unforeseen at the time of the writing of this article, Sallisa Rosa will not be exhibiting at Open Studios this year.
