About the artist

Willem de Rooij (b. 1969, Beverwijk, The Netherlands)

Born in 1969 in Beverwijk, Netherlands, Willem de Rooij works in a variety of media including film and installation. From 1990-1995 he studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, and from 1997-1998 at the Rijksakademie. He has served as Professor of Art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany since 2006 and as a tutor at De Ateliers in Amsterdam since 2002.

He worked in collaboration with Jeroen de Rijke from 1994 to 2006, as De Rijke / De Rooij. Together with De Rijke he mounted major exhibitions at K21, Düsseldorf (2007), and at the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (2008). They represented The Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 2005.

In 2004, De Rooij began to include works of other artists in his own artworks. For example, his film Mandarin Ducks was shown at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2005 within the context of objects and artworks from the museums’ collection. In 2010, de Rooij’s exhibition Intolerance at the Neuenationalgalerie incorporated 17th century Dutch paintings and 19th century Hawaiian feathered objects. In 2007, de Rooij made two installations in which he included the work of artists Isa Genzken, Keren Cytter, and designer Fong-Leng, one at Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris named “The Floating Feather,” and one at Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Cologne named “Birds in a Park.” His 2009 installation Birds was shown at Cubitt Artists in London, amongst other works by Dutch artist Vincent Vulsma. Since 2002, De Rooij has been making sculptures made of flowers called the ‘Bouquet’-series.

De Rooij has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including Portikus, Frankfurt. Germany (2020); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2017); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2016); Le Consortium, Dijon (2015); The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, Sweden (2015); The Jewish Museum, New York (2014); Kunstverein München, Munich (2012), among others.

His work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous galleries and museums including Neues Museum, Nuremberg, Germany (2020); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017); National Gallery, Prague (2016); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015) and Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2012), among many others.

Willem de Rooij is a recipient of the Vincent Award Nomination, The Vincent van Gogh Biennial Award for Contemporary Art in Europe, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague (2014); the Hugo Boss Prize Nomination, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2004), and the Prix de Rome, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (1996), among others.