Artist: Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (AMVK, *1951 in Antwerp, Belgium) has blazed a distinctive trail in contemporary art, renowned for her iconic collages, drawings, and mixed-media works that fuse art and technology. For over five decades, her prolific career has been marked by relentless innovation and an unceasing drive to create. Trained in Graphic Design at the Fine Arts Academy of Antwerp, AMVK’s journey as an artist officially began in 1974 with works on paper. However, she often notes that her creative drive started much earlier. A pivotal shift occurred in the 1980s when she embraced computer-generated graphics, opening up an immense world of possibilities for her practice.

AMVK’s work spans a diverse array of media, including drawings, collages, digital animations, text, sound, and video. Her pieces are visually and conceptually striking, often forging connections between elements that seem, at first glance, disparate or even contradictory. Her practice consistently engages with themes such as philosophy, consciousness, feminism, representations of women in mass media, artificial intelligence, and cyberpunk, to name a few. Known for her provocative use of imagery sourced from soft porn magazines, comics, and mass media, she infuses her works with references to literature, language, music, and counterculture. These elements transform her pieces into cultural time capsules that, while reflecting the times they emerged from, also resonate with AMVK’s broader questioning of identity and the interconnectedness of all things.

Marking AMVK’s practice is a tension between the aleatory and the intentional. Her works often juxtapose seemingly random motifs, materials, and temporal references, yet a closer look reveals an underlying logic that ties them together. She has spoken of employing self-made systems of order—logical yet enigmatic, even to her, as they reflect the workings of her unconscious.

The retrospective “Dudoute_Toaster_Absolu (AMVK 1981–2025)” exemplifies this approach, originating from AMVK’s desire to revisit and recontextualize her earlier works. At its heart lies the video “A-X+B=12”, a digital animation that brings to life a series of her drawings, collages, and installations from 1981 onward. This “coming of age” piece traces the journey of an entity entering the world and becoming an artist, mirroring AMVK’s own trajectory. To create the animation, she methodically selected works to form a theory, contrasting this process with a multi-dimensional selection of music and sounds. The result is an amalgam of intentional, slowly diffusing imagery and a fluid soundtrack, embodying some of the forces that define her practice.

Revisiting “A-X+B=12” inspired the structure of the retrospective. AMVK reviewed the animation’s components, carefully selecting key works for the show. She then created new works between 2023 and 2025, directly informed by these earlier pieces, establishing a dialogue between past and present. Her approach underscores her belief in the cyclical nature of time, where fragments of the past recur and resonate with new meaning in the present. AMVK draws parallels between her process and Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence—a looping repetition of themes, materials, and ideas that resists linearity and transforms perpetually into new variations.

For much of her career, AMVK worked exclusively in series, reflecting her deep commitment to exploring the interconnectedness of things. In recent years, her creations have evolved into standalone works that often echo earlier pieces, revealing her ongoing exploration of rediscovery, reinterpretation, and subversion of meaning. This retrospective unfolds as a nonlinear narrative, where fragments of the past and present merge according to a logic known only to the artist. The result is an evocative and immersive experience for viewers, offering insight into the artist’s unique worldview.

In “Dudoute_Toaster_Absolu (AMVK 1981–2025)”, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven’s life and career come to a “full circle” moment. The exhibition reflects her belief that she herself has become the structure that guides her creative process—a dynamic interplay of past, present, and future that invites audiences to witness the eternal recurrence of her life and work.

Text by: Susana Turbay Botero