Tjalf Sparnaay

Tjalf Sparnaay is a Dutch artist whose most typical paintings include fried eggs, French fries, sandwiches, ketchup bottles, Barbie dolls, marbles and autumn leaves. Sparnaay visualizes these trivial subjects and inflates them to enormous formats.

Sparnaay’s paintings are so full of saturated colours and heightened contrast, his paintings not only document reality but also intensify this by blowing up these everyday objects to mega-proportions. This gives him the opportunity to explore every detail and dissect it layer by layer in order to arrive at the core of his theme. The way in which Sparnaay approaches his work refers directly to the seventeenth century. He resembles Vermeer in his lucid use of colour and eye for detail and refinement, while the lighting in his paintings recall the play of light and shadow in the work of Rembrandt.

Sparnaay elaborates on the rich seventeenth-century Dutch tradition of the still life, but does so, on an individual and modern manner. He is constantly seeking new images that have never been painted.

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