Riet Wijnen (1988, Venray, the Netherlands) is an artist based in Amsterdam who works mostly in the media of photography, sculptures, video, and text writing. In her work, she explores links between abstraction, perception, language, and structures through the historiography of abstraction in different fields: starting with early modernism in art and slowly moving towards science, philosophy and activism. This research comes together in the cycle Sixteen Conversations on Abstraction which Wijnen started in 2015.
She also publishes books and cahiers, such as Homophone Dictionary (2019, forthcoming), Grace Crowley (2019, forthcoming), Marlow Moss (2013) and Abstraction Création: Art non-figuratif (reprint and translation) (2014), Conversation One: A Preface (2015), Conversation Four: First Person Moving (2016), Conversation Six: Double (2018) and is working on The Registry of Pseudonyms, an on-going accumulation of pseudonyms on the website registryofpseudonyms.com. These books and the website are an integral part of Wijnen's practice, function independently, as sources and works at the same time. Wijnen’s solo exhibitions include Kunstverein, Milan (2020, forthcoming), Manifold Books, Amsterdam (2019), Lumen Travo, Amsterdam (2018), P/////AKT, Amsterdam (2016), Dolores, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam (2015), and archipelago, Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen (2015). She participated in several groups shows among others at SculptureCenter, New York, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA, Portland, Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht, and Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm. Wijnen is currently teaching at the Graphic Design department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.