The work of Roos van Dijk (Utrecht, 1989) starts from her personal experience of modern architecture. She explores our constantly expanding urban environment with her camera and subsequently draws inspiration from the resulting archive of photographs, which she then translates into hard-edge paintings and modest structures. During this process, she plays with the image, modifying it and removing every human trace. This method only leaves the content that contributes to her personal experience of the moment; merely the naked structure of the buildings will be cast in fine layers of acrylic paint. She executes her work in a precise, diligent way, inclined to a formal style, creating sharp dancing patterns of colour, light and shadow, and bringing a linear clarity into the rush of modern life.

Earlier, she had based her work on grand modern architecture made of concrete, steel and glass. But the endless rows of pastel coloured apartment buildings of Kosice (SK), which she encountered during an artist-in-residence period, triggered her interest in the architectural leftovers from the socialist era. The big, overwhelming fields of colour, continuous grids of balconies and windows, and repeating patterns of shadows and décor form the focus of her latest series of paintings, and take shape in her recently created plaster structures.