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Bobbi Essers has emerged as a uniquely mature voice from a new generation of artists born this side of the millennium. We explore the ways this has impacted her work, and how accurately she captures the zeitgeist of a youthful generation on the hunt for adventure and connection.
“My work is really about bonds of friendship, and intimacy, but in a very platonic way. It’s about showing a generation’s life, a Zeitgeist.”
Last year, Dutch artist Bobbi Essers was featured in an Artsy article titled, “10 Emerging Painters Born in the 2000s to Watch Now”.
The article listed a group of young stars, all rising rapidly through the ranks of the artworld, linked together through the observation that, “young artists’ practices are looking inwards, examining their own lives, identities, and experiences, while attempting to situate themselves within a volatile and at times frightening world.”
Just like a concerned parent trying to understand their teenage child, this style of prophetic analysis is commonly used among artworld commentators to decipher the new visual languages evolving in tandem with the up-and-coming artists of tomorrow.
In a globalised society becoming increasingly self-aware, it may come as no surprise that artists born into a new millennium are no longer affiliating themselves with the broad artistic movements and manifestos that defined the 20th century. Instead, as pointed out above, the artistic voices of Gen-Z have a predisposition towards the personal, often choosing to reflect their own individual identities and experiences in their work.
Within this context of youthful introspection, Bobbi Essers has emerged as a uniquely mature talent, able to deftly represent the spectrum of self- and other-hood on an impressive scale. Her debut solo exhibition, The World at Our Command, opening at Unit on 28 September documents the many intimate interactions between herself and her close-knit friendship group, portrayed through overlapping compositions and interchangeable canvases that manifest a potent interconnectivity.
Her artworks mirror the closeness of her own relationships, since Essers’ friends are central to her understanding of the world. As a young girl with a habit of reading fantasy novels she would daydream of adventure, impatient to travel the world with her own fellowship of brave companions. Having now found such a group, and emerging from intense times such as the Covid lockdowns very closely bonded, the artist is able to now fulfil her dreams of adventure and document them simultaneously:
“My love for my friends makes me want to put them on a pedestal, so a lot of times they’re portrayed larger than life because I try to give them the stage to stand on. I love the things we do, and I’m very proud of that, and I want to show it. Fixing a sense of the Zeitgeist is very important in my work because it becomes an archive of what we do and how much fun we have, how much love we have for each other.”
The exhibition’s showstopper is a three-meter tall work also named The World at Our Command, and the depiction of a three-armed embrace that fills its expanse appears to summarise the artist’s intentions, “I felt like I wanted something that’s really towering over you, so that the two people that hug in the painting are so big that it’s almost god-like.” As audiences worldwide vie for immersive experiences, whether digital or sensory, that allow them to escape reality as totally as possible, the scale of Essers’ work performs what we might call an inclusive effect; in this case, being enveloped by and welcomed into the painting allows you to fleetingly join Essers’ gang.
Demonstrative of the innovation and non-conformity that Gen-Z are becoming widely known for, a unique feature of Essers’ layered compositions is the fact they are comprised of interchangeable canvases, able to be reconfigured at will. The ability to rearrange the compositions without the artist’s knowledge or involvement implicitly involves the viewer in Essers’ own memories, and demands a profound level of trust from the artist.
Thankfully, the unexpected compositions that come from such playful experimentation are indebted to the extraordinary well of sentimental subject matter Essers is drawing on. If a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, then a friendship group is only as united as its most dissociated member. Testament to the intimacy and trust that Essers has imbued this series through her deeply intimate yet platonic relationships, the resultant artworks are able to be rearranged at will with no one configuration failing to integrate with another.
Disjointed, overwhelming, interconnected, hybrid; all words that could describe both Essers’ work and the world she was born into, confirming Essers profound ability to capture a generation’s ever-changing forms, dreams, and above all desperation for connection.
Essers operates along the lines of the old axiom, “Your friends are the family you choose.” At the heart of her work is a deterministic confidence that she is in control of her destiny, as the exhibition title The World at Our Command confirms.
“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.”
