Text Irina Rusinovich @_rusinovich
Van der Mark’s paintings begin with the kind of looking that most people do without registering the observation of bodies in commercial space, of how identity is continuously negotiated through appearance, gesture, and the particular quality of presence someone brings to a room. Fashion shows, boutiques, cafés, urban interiors: environments engineered around desire and self-presentation, which van der Mark treats not as symbols to be critiqued but as the actual terrain her figures move through, with full awareness of what that terrain demands and what they choose to give it.
The women in these works occupy their surroundings with a quality that resists easy categorization. They are neither defiant nor compliant, neither performing for an implied audience nor withdrawing from one. What van der Mark captures is something more precise the specific composure of someone who understands the visual systems around her and has decided, on her own terms, how to inhabit them. Fashion operates in this context as it does in life: simultaneously as a language of self-expression and a structure that shapes what can be expressed, a tension the paintings hold without attempting to resolve.
Working in the figurative tradition, van der Mark uses oil paint to insist on presence in a moment that privileges circulation over duration. The deliberateness of the medium is part of the argument each figure demands a quality of attention that the environments she moves through are not necessarily designed to produce. In slowing the image down, van der Mark makes visible what speed tends to flatten: the interiority behind self-presentation, the authorship within appearance.
Belonging to Myself takes its title seriously, without sentiment. Across this body of work, identity is something the figures actively construct rather than passively receive, located not in opposition to the visual culture surrounding them but in a conscious, self-directed relationship with it.
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