Maartje Stapel makes personal and emotional works, in which she uses her surroundings, daily life, and things that might seem mundane as inspiration.

Maartje’s work is personal as it is emotional. The mundane is her inspiration.
Her surroundings, her daily life, a woman in red at the corner of the street, a white wall in a museum, a friend who asks her why she cries so easily.
The mundane in expression, expression in the mundane.

Maartje observes, reflects, and interprets.
The dust that lives in her flatmate’s room, male modernist monochromes, her own emotions.  She tries to shape her interpretations into texts, textiles, performances and installations by adopting a minimal uniform style. That is how she tries to bring matter back to its essence.

Maartje hopes to make works that explicitly tell the truth or lie. One of the the main themes in her practice is the tension between truthfulness, sincerity and fiction. In her work, she often takes examples and experiences from daily life (truth) and then add new layers and reflections (non-truth).

Her aim is to make work that is at the same time emotional in content and simple in form. Formal emotionality.

Maartje Stapel lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

She recently graduated from the fine arts department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.