BIO

Heather den Uijl is a contemporary artist who currently lives and works in Houston Texas. den Uijl received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2020 and her BFA from the University of Houston in 2016. Her work has been exhibited at the Blaffer Art Museum, Winter Street Studios, the Lawndale Art Center, Fieldwork Gallery, Jonathan Hopson Gallery, Halls and Walls Gallery, Women and their Work, Box 13 Art Space, and the Visual Arts Center. den Uijl has been the recipient of the David Price Endowed Presidential Scholarship Award, the Doolin Scholarship for Studio Art, and the Marshall F. Wells Scholarship and Fellowship Endowment. Her work has been published in Voyage Houston Magazine, Shoutout Magazine, and featured in New American Paintings West Issue #150.

SELECT NEWS & PRESS

Meet Heather den Uijl: Painter - Shoutout HTX

_____: Revisited: 2020 Studio Art MFA Thesis Exhibition - The Visual Arts Center

Meet Heather Den Uijl - Voyage Magazine

STATEMENT

My work utilizes the visual rhetoric found in everyday packaging for toys and junk food. I borrow and distill basic visual elements such as color, font type, and composition from these sources and merge them with processes and influences from other painting traditions such as pop art and color field painting. The work functions independently as hybrid environments where distillation, flattening, and fragmentation help them resist a sense of closure, while also creating familiarity and the promise of interpretation. Through the use of basic familiar design elements such as circles, polygons, stripes, and color relationships that feel purposeful, the work creates spaces that are carefully layered, interwoven, and suggestive of both deep illusory space and flattened graphic space.

There is an invitation to participate in the visual games of painting, familiarity, and expectation; to grapple with contemporary visual information but never be able to pinpoint its exact source. This resistance to an overarching explanation or conclusion allows the work to be openended and oblique, leaving room for interpretation, speculation, and curiosity.