Artist: Bobbi Essers

Unit presents the premier UK solo exhibition of Dutch rising star Bobbi Essers. Coinciding with Frieze London, the exhibition follows several of Essers’ notable European institutional presentations in 2024, including at Centraal Museum, Utrecht, and Museum MORE, Gorssel.

The World at Our Command illustrates the importance of intimacy within platonic relationships. Defined by overlapping compositions that echo surrealist photomontages, Essers’ fragmented canvases are full of limbs, bodies, clothes and accessories taken from candid photographs of her friends. By monumentalising those dearest to her, Essers both honours their love and documents the experiences and adventures they have shared.

The exhibition demonstrates the maturity with which the artist is developing her contemporary portraiture. Despite working from objective sources such as photographs, Essers uses her protean compositions to explore the complexities of relationships and the inconsistent nature of memory. Fractured, but not disjointed, her protagonists morph into another as if part of one body, treading a dreamlike line between the figurative and the surreal.

Bobbi Essers’ paintings depict the intensity and intimacy of her personal relationships, as she finds inspiration for her larger-than-life works from the deep friendships she has developed with those closest to her. Drawing from candid, spontaneous photographs of her friends, often late at night and therefore using a strong flash, she captures these illuminated moments where her subjects are suddenly and candidly revealed.

Motivated to protect the anonymity of her friends, she constructs interchangeable and overlapping compositions from her source images, allowing for multiple references and emotions to be expressed simultaneously on the same canvas.

Her distinctive aesthetic is defined by limbs and objects transgressing across borders, reaching over one another and even out towards the viewer. Faces are hidden or obscured, as these are among the features that resonate least with Essers.

“The face doesn’t hold much power for me. There are many more ways to understand the closeness of people than through their facial expressions, which can easily be faked anyway, i.e. ‘Smile for the camera!’. My work is more about the friendship than the friends themselves.”

Manifesting a potent sense of interconnectivity, Essers’ works speak to her generation’s sense of longing for platonic intimacy in the face of rapid societal developments. Rebutting the anxieties that can feel consuming to younger generations, the artist is exceptionally secure in her own skin, as the exhibition title The World at Our Command confirms.

Operating along the lines of the old axiom, “Your friends are the family you choose”, at the heart of Essers’ work is a deterministic confidence that she is in control of her destiny: “It’s saying that we decide our own world. I command what I paint and how I do it, and why. It’s also a generational thing. We are up-and-coming, and we are leading in our own ways.”