Nina Vandeweghe lives and works in Brussels, (BE) and studied illustration and painting at KASK, Ghent. After graduation, she worked mainly as a commissioned illustrator. She worked for newspapers, magazines, theater companies, etc…
For the past 2-3 years she has mainly focused on her visual art practice, which manifests itself in paintings but also sculptures, short text fragments and essays.
In recent years she has shown work at Alice Gallery, Brussels and Enari Gallery (NL), among others.
Her works exhibit a direct humorous, illustrative and expressive style, and gains depth and complexity through the succession of layer upon layer, from which the images emerge. In the process, she reuses fragments and colors from previous works. This creates a visual vocabulary that is spontaneous and playful, but also acts as a reminder of the creative process. She also constructs compositions with fictional, cartoonish characters. These characters are used to magnify her own themes such as emotions, make them manageable and approach them with humor.
Nina mainly creates colorful, playful paintings that are grafted onto her own experience, but they are also socially critical.
In her works you will find references to kitsch, cuteness, pop culture and the cartoon world.
She often takes language as a starting point in her work. Fragments of text, a word, a sentence or a quote provide the impetus for a new work. She has a penchant for clichés, automatic and reflexive thought patterns. (See previous project: ‘Dictionary of ready-made ideas’)
From the interaction between image and text (whether in the image itself or in the title), comic meaning emerges.
Nina Vandeweghe’s work explores the complexities and contradictions of emotions. The melting element in her work symbolizes the sometimes elusive emotions.
Her work shows, often with humor, human vulnerability and explores the personal versus the public domain. And in doing so, also explores the boundaries. The public domain refers to the viewer. By incorporating personal artifacts into her work, Nina gives an insight into her personal life but also tries to break taboos. She does this by working autofictionally. The artist borrows this term from literature. In autofiction, details from the author’s life are mixed with fictional information, characters and events.
Her work contains influences from artists who also incorporate the personal into their work.
These include Sophie Calle, Tracey Emin, Mike Kelly, Pauline Boty, among others.
In her work, Nina Vandeweghe connects the personal, the intimate through themes such as insomnia, mental health, medication, rat race, love, female body, feminism, etc… with cultural associations and the political landscape.
