As Amsterdam celebrates a remarkable cultural milestone, A Centre Without a Middle reflects on the city not as a fixed point, but as a space shaped by exchange, movement, and imagination. Featuring new and recent works by Gegee Ayurzanaa, Nik Christensen, Bob Jonkers, Carmen Schabracq, and Bas van Wieringen, artista and curator of the shpow, the exhibition explores Amsterdam as a meeting ground — where local and global narratives merge, identities shift, and artistic voices intertwine across time.

Far from a nostalgic tribute, the exhibition looks forward, celebrating the complexity and fluidity that have long defined the city’s cultural identity. The artists present diverse yet interconnected practices that resonate with Amsterdam’s layered history — not by illustrating it, but by continuing its openness and ambiguity in the now.

Gegee Ayurzanaa’s paintings are marked by a generous materiality and a quietly visceral presence. Working primarily in oil on cut canvas or wooden panels, she constructs gestural, meandering compositions in which organic forms seem to push outward, as if testing their own boundaries. Her brushwork is unruly yet controlled, producing painterly passages that feel at once corporeal and elusive — fragments of something remembered, or imagined, brought briefly into focus. Her work suggests an ongoing negotiation between structure and surrender, invoking the symbolic weight of modernist abstraction while remaining open to chance, intuition, and spirituality. Through a language that is at once intellectual and emotional, Ayurzanaa draws subtly on the nomadic narratives of her native Mongolia — not through direct reference, but as a background hum of displacement, transformation, and continuity. A recent resident at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, she is nominated for the 2025 Royal Award for Modern Painting.

Nik Christensen is a British-born artist based in Amsterdam, known for his expressive monochromatic works that bridge drawing and painting. Having spent two decades working exclusively in black ink on paper, Christensen has recently transitioned to canvas. His paintings are executed with wide Japanese brushes and black acrylics, producing dynamic compositions through an improvisational, hit-and-run process. The raw immediacy of these works is grounded in Christensen’s longstanding engagement with Japanese aesthetics — from Ukiyo-e woodcuts and Butoh dance to Kurosawa cinema. He maintains a studio in Kamiyama, Japan, where he deepens his research into material and method. His work is held in the collections of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag and the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, among others.

Bob Jonkers explores the fragile dynamics of identity, intimacy, and belonging through highly personal figurative painting. Often grounded in self-portraiture and scenes from his immediate surroundings, his works are quiet but charged, drawing attention to what is shown, withheld, or in flux. By focusing on both human and non-human subjects in moments of vulnerability, Jonkers challenges ideas of curated identity and asks what lies beyond performance. His work invites viewers to engage in their own self-reflection — probing what we reveal, conceal, and project in a world saturated with stylized representation.

Carmen Schabracq is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, ceramics, textile, costume design, and performance. Her colourful, layered works often explore the mask — both literal and metaphorical — as a tool of transformation. Schabracq draws on myths, rituals, and folklore to create vibrant, collage-like worlds where figures oscillate between play and power, celebration and ambiguity. With a background in painting (Gerrit Rietveld Academie) and theatre costume (Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp), she brings together materiality and meaning through expressive colour, narrative, and form. In 2024, she designed the masks and costumes for the opera The Gospel According to the Other Mary at the Volksoper in Vienna. Her work has been shown in institutions including the Stedelijk Museum Breda, CBK Zuidoost, Museum Tot Zover, and Nest in The Hague, and is part of the collections of the Dutch Ministry of the Interior, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and the AkzoNobel Art Foundation.

Bas van Wieringen uses minimal yet potent interventions to unravel the absurdities of everyday life. Often humorous and poetic, his works invite viewers to reconsider situations through a lens of serious play. “For me, a work works when it makes sense in nonsense,” he says — a guiding principle evident in his subtle, surprising sculptural gestures. With a background in both performance and visual art, Van Wieringen’s practice blends lightness with gravity, drawing attention to what we overlook or take for granted. His work is held in public collections including the Frans Hals Museum and the Groninger Museum, as well as numerous private collections in the Netherlands and beyond.