Atelier Van Lieshout rose to fame with projects that travel between the world of minimalist design and non-functional art, including sculptures and installations, buildings and furniture, utopias and dystopias.

Atelier Van Lieshout is the studio founded by sculptor, painter and visionary Joep van Lieshout. Van Lieshout graduated from the Rotterdam Art Academy and, in 1995, the artist founded his studio and has been working solely under the studio’s name ever since. The studio moniker exists in Van Lieshout’s practice as a methodology towards undermining the myth of the artistic genius.

Over the past three decades, Van Lieshout has established a multidisciplinary practice that produces works on the borders between art, design and architecture. Van Lieshout dissects systems, be it society as a whole or the human body; he experiments, looks for alternatives, takes exhibitions as experiments for recycling and has even declared an independent state named AVL-Ville (2001), located in the port of Rotterdam. All of which are conducted within Van Lieshout’s signature style of provocation – be it political or material. Indeed, his works share a number of recurring themes, motives and obsessions: systems, power, autarky, life, sex and death. His prolific sculpture, Domestikator (2015), is an apt example, having caused controversy before being placed at the Louvre in Jardin des Tuilleries. It was later adopted by the Centre Pompidou, where it was shown during the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain in 2017.

Van Lieshout combines an imaginative aesthetic and ethic with a spirit of entrepreneurship; his work has sparked movements in the fields of architecture and ecology, and has been internationally celebrated, exhibited and published. Van Lieshout’s works have been included in the Gwangju, Venice, Yokohama, Christchurch, Shanghai and São Paulo Bienniales. Atelier Van Lieshout have won many awards since 1991, including the prix de Rome in 1995.

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