Thomas Raat - AS IF
Stigter Van Doesburg, Amsterdam 25.04 – 30.05 – 2026
Thomas Raat returns to Stigter van Doesburg with AS IF, an exhibition that sits comfortably in the space between things: between painting and sculpture, between art history and the everyday, between something finished and something unresolved.
Raat's work has never been easy to pin down, and that's precisely the point. Moving across media and disciplines, he draws freely from art history, graphic design, and the visual logic of industrial production. Not to quote them, but to test what they can still do. The result is work that looks familiar and strange at once.
The heart of the exhibition is a series of sculptures called Models. Made from machine-cut, powder-coated tubular steel and metal mesh. They have a clear physical presence, you notice them immediately. Upon closer inspection they reveal themselves as open, almost diagrammatic things: hollow tubes, visible joints, see through mesh. Nothing is hidden. The construction is right there in front of you, which raises the question of what, exactly, is being constructed? An object, or a meaning, or both? Raat keeps that question open on purpose.
The paintings that accompany the sculptures are quieter, operating in a kind of minimalist register. They carry traces of modernism without being beholden to it, and they blur, sometimes uncomfortably, the line between art and non-art. Raat’s reoccurring interest in graphic design and other systems of visual organization resurface in this exhibition in a painterly context, lending the works a functional, almost institutional quality that keeps you second-guessing what you're looking at.
AS IF is an exhibition about interpretation, about how we read objects, and how much we see ourselves in what is read.
Thomas Raat (b. 1979, Leiderdorp) lives and works in the Netherlands. He studied at the Koninklijke Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten, Den Haag, and the Norwich School of Art and Design, before completing residencies at the Delfina Studio Programme, London (2005–06), SPACE Studios, London (2008), the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (2011–12), and the Maison Van Doesburg, Meudon (2017). His work has been exhibited widely across Europe and beyond, with solo presentations at institutions including Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden, Onomatopee, Eindhoven, Schunck*, Heerlen, and ANDOR Gallery, London, among others. Group exhibitions have taken him to the Bonnefanten Museum, Dordrechts Museum, Grand Rapids Art Museum, and the FIAC in Paris. His work features in collections including ABN Amro. AS IF is his second solo exhibition at Stigter van Doesburg, following Dynasty in 2022.
