Gert Jan Slotboom
Exhibition Humanoids
13-06-2026 -31-08-2026
Harpy, 2023 250x65cm.
Looking down the stairs, 2025 100x200cm.
Harpy, 2023 250x65cm
Gert Jan Slotboom
In the opening exhibition Humanoids, Gert Jan Slotboom presents two compelling works: Looking Down the Stairs (2025) and Harpy (2023).
Originally from Wageningen and now working in the Frisian town of IJlst, Slotboom is a painter who explores the human figure in all its vulnerability and intensity. His work balances on the threshold between the familiar and the unsettling. He depicts bodies and beings that are at once recognisable and estranging—as though they were echoes of our own existence in a world shaped by contradiction.
In Looking Down the Stairs, the viewer looks down a staircase, sharing a moment of hesitation or fascination in which light and darkness, height and depth converge in a charged tension. The painting raises questions about what we see, what we dare to see, and what remains beyond our field of vision.
Harpy brings a mythical creature to life: half woman, half bird of prey—a powerful and unsettling presence that embodies both beauty and menace. The painting possesses a raw, almost archaic vitality that feels at once contemporary and timeless.
Slotboom's paintings reveal an intense engagement with the human condition. They invite us to contemplate figures that seem not entirely of this world, yet for that very reason reflect our own time, our desires, and our unease with even greater clarity—all filtered through a deeply personal and at times solitary imaginative world.
With these two works, Galerie Postpartum opens a dialogue about the human in all its complexity: fragile, hybrid, and inescapably present.
Biography
Gert Jan Slotboom (Wageningen, 1957) graduated from the Utrecht School of the Arts in 1983. He lives and works in IJlst, where he has built a powerful and consistent body of work over the course of several decades.
Slotboom enjoys working in series and observes the world with the wonder of an outsider. His paintings are charged with a distinctive tension: they are at once desolate and beautiful, lonely and intense, oppressive yet curiously comforting.
He paints monumental bridges and church interiors with the sense of awe of a child overwhelmed by the grandeur of the adult world. The abandoned greenhouses where he played as a boy reappear in his work as places of uncanny melancholy.
Particularly over the past decade, his Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) series has received widespread acclaim. In these life-sized portraits, Slotboom presents the human figure in all its naked vulnerability: raw, unembellished, rendered with powerful brushstrokes and a restrained palette. The encounter can be deeply confronting. As a viewer, you find yourself both voyeur and fellow human—unsettled and moved, often recognising something of yourself in these solitary, mortal figures.
Slotboom's work engages with universal themes such as loneliness, vulnerability, and the uncompromising beauty of existence, always painted with genuine empathy and an acute eye for detail.
CV