Invites Focus: Puck Verkade

With the release of our new Invites Vol.2 publication, which marks the milestone of 50 exhibitions since the series began in 2012, we’re delighted to share some exclusive material from our archives. Each fortnight we will be focussing on one Invites alumni, giving access to interviews, installation views, and links to recent and upcoming projects. Also check out the Zabludowicz Collection Instagram for some gems from artists’ back-catalogues and some behind-the-scenes work in progress.

Invites Focus: Puck Verkade, 22 June – 5 July 2020

Puck Verkade is a video and installation artist based in London and originally from the Netherlands. She graduated from Goldsmiths University in 2017 and since then has consistently experimented and moved her practice forward, combining interests in music and spatial installation to create ever more ambitious and timely video installations. Directly after graduating her moving image works prominently featured personal mobile phone footage and found imagery to explore social situations and formative moments in both a cathartic and diaristic manner. In 2018 she moved away from the use of documentary and phone footage, and began to experiment with shifting between visual modes of stop motion animation, green screen, direct to camera performance and fast paced montages that have the sensation of a cartoon reality. Her approach, whatever the outcome, invokes humour to encourage interrogation of the contradictory nature of human behaviour, echoing the complexity of society.

Plague, the installation that made up her Invites exhibition (12 September–20 October 2019) feels entirely prescient as the privileged find themselves emerging from their homes after pandemic lockdown. The central character (played by Verkade) is a cartoon housewife, clearly suffering from agoraphobia and mentally struggling to cope with her lot, battling a down to earth housefly who is exposing some uncomfortable home truths.

Plague explores the connections and divergences of humans and nature through a feverish yet lyrical confrontation between the housewife and the fly. The exhibition centred on an ambitious large scale installation featuring a single channel projection surrounded by giant sculptural chips. You can see more images on her exhibition page.

We are partnering with Independent Collectors to show Plague online for the next two weeks, catch it whilst you can on their Vimeo Channel. We are thrilled to be able to show here a selection of the watercolours she produced whilst developing and storyboarding the film, these watercolours have subsequently been featured on @notcancelled.art and on you can see a short talk on her work on her galleries IGTV. If you scroll down far enough on this page you will also find her ‘making of’ Plague Instagram story, a great insight into her working process.

In another most prescient turn, in March Verkade created and embodied a new character, DJ Quarantinah, creating special DJ sets and podcasts that create a sense of community at a time of distinct isolation. Listen to HOME ALONE FM with DJ Quarantinah, Puck says Episode 4 Staying in Touch is her favourite, but you can listen to them all on her Soundcloud.

Puck’s works Breeder and Doing Lucy are available to stream and view on daata (which is currently offering 3 months free trail) she is represented by Dürst Britt Mayhew, The Hauge and her rescheduled solo show will open there in November.

Puck Verkade b. 1987, the Netherlands. Lives and works in London.
Verkade holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University, London, and a BFA from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, the Netherlands.

Solo exhibitions include those at Artissima Fair, Turin, Italy (2019), DKUK, London (2019); Dresden Art Foundation, Dresden (2019); Forde, Geneva (2018); Art Night London at OXO Tower Bargehouse, London (2018); Dürst Britt & Mayhew, The Hague (2017); Sunday Art Fair with Dürst Britt & Mayhew, London (2017) Berlin Feminist Film Festival and LOOP in Barcelona.

Group exhibitions include those at Aalto Studios, Helsinki (2019); Somerset House Studios, London (2018); ArtRio, Rio de Janeiro (2018); NADA Miami with Daata Editions, Miami (2018); Liste Art Fair with Dürst Britt & Mayhew, Basel (2018); White Crypt, London (2018); Chelsea College of Arts, London (2018); Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco (2018); Compagnietheater, Amsterdam (2018); Museum Hilversum, Hilversum (2017). She was a resident artist at Sarabande: The Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation. Verkade’s work is held in private and public collections, including the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Servais, EKARD & Zabludowicz Collections and AKZO Nobel Art Foundation. Forthcoming shows include a solo exhibition at Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Poland 2021, an artist commission for London Science Gallery/ Birth Rites Collection and a video project with the Explorers Film Club in Basel, Switzerland 2021. Verkade is represented by Dürst Britt & Mayhew, The Hague.