Photography of Essers courtesy of UNIT London
The shiny black leather of a coat morphs into the bruised knee, while the top right panel reveals a steering wheel, gripped by an Adidas-sleeved hand. The composition, fragmented yet cohesive, brings together these seemingly disjointed elements as if they were cut and reassembled in a constructivist-like photomontage.
United by a thematic consistency and colour palette, the panels of Should We Just Keep Driving? create a narrative that pulses the energy of a modern-day Kerouac-esque journey on the road. Against a dark backdrop, cool-toned blues and indigoes mingle with patches of gleaming bare skin, illuminated by the harsh glare of the camera flashlight.
In this fleeting, fragmented view, only a glimpse of a pierced ear, a curve of the collar bone, the soft fold of a palm are revealed - but never a face. Yet, precisely by this careful omission, the deliberate decision to go beyond focusing on facial expressions to convey closeness between people, contemporary Dutch artist Bobbi Essers is able to portray an intimacy that feels raw and immediate, the intensely personal moments suspended in time.
Bobbi Essers, Should we just keep driving?, 2024
Bobbi Essers (b.2000, Enschede, Netherlands), is an artist now based in Amsterdam. A Fine Art graduate from HKU Utrecht in 2022, she won the Buning Brongers Prize for Painting the same year. In 2023, she received a prestigious Royal Award for Modern Painting, presented by King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, and is now staging her first UK solo show, The World at Our Command, at Unit London. Fresh off a whirlwind tour of European museums - Centraal Museum in Utrecht and Museum MORE in Grossel included - Essers is bringing her signature blend of fragmented intimacy and surreal connection for the London art scene’s viewing pleasure.
The way in which the young figurative artist disassembled and reassembled her canvases like puzzle pieces, either by manipulating perspective through trompe-l'œil-ish techniques or physically piecing together separate panels into one composition, challenges traditional linearity in favour of a more fragmented perception of time. From disembodied hands with chipped black nail polish gripping bus handrail to XXL doll-worth manicured fingers slightly lifting up the shirt to reveal a freshly healing sparkles tattoo on an androgynous body (might they belong to the same person in their different eras?); from intimately large canvases to boldly cropped panels - her paintings convey the gravity of the tightly-knit queer group of friends, navigating their early twenties.
Regarded as one of the key voices of Gen Z, Essers captures the generation that sets off on a hunt for adventure and connection. It comes as no surprise, of course, that artists emerging from a new millennium have increasingly distanced themselves from the grand artistic movements and manifestos that dominated the 20th century, instead embracing the personal. As Essers herself explains, “My work is really about bonds of friendship, and intimacy, but in a very platonic way. It’s about showing a generation’s life, a Zeitgeist’, which appears very much in line with the good old “your friends are the family you choose” axiom.
From left to right: Bobbi Essers, You can bet it was me, 2024, No one to tell us no, 2024
Here, tetris-like photomontage meets dreamscape, where boundaries between friends dissolve - sometimes literally - as figures meld into one another in compositions as layered as the friendships portrayed. Think limbs, torsos, and garments scattered across the canvas like a morning after a chaotic house party (minus limbs and torsos, of course!) - all serving as a mode not only to document the artist’s relationships but more so to explore the ephemeral, surreal experience of shared connection through the varying yet recurring motifs.
‘Repetition is not simply the recurrence of the same, but the creation of difference in the same’, writes Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, in which he overrides the conventional notion of memory as stable but presents it as a site of continual reinvention and transformation - a provocative concept for 1968, really. In that sense, memory is never a passive recollection but an active process of variation and reinterpretation. Similarly to the framework suggested by Deleuze, Essers’ idea of time and memory is not a straight line but a web, overlapping durations and temporalities. Always in flux, the past becomes characterized by a constant reconfiguration, folding into the present in ways that are never quite identical.
Installation shots courtesy of UNIT London
Among the airy and expansive gallery space of a Hanover Square-based Unit London, the canvases stretch and shimmer, drawing you into the world where nostalgia and raw emotions intwine, detouring in a memory lane. Questioning the traditional roles of gender and sexuality, Essers shifts her focus to how these identities surpass the surface-level appearances or fixed roles. The close attention to skin, tattoos, and textures, allows her to preserve the emotions and stories embedded within the imperfections they possess, making you feel like stumbling across a visual diary from a life spent in stolen, flash-lit moments.
So, in The World at Our Command’s final week on view, ditch the dating fatigue and Hinge doomscroll, and come catch a glimpse of Essers’ chaotic, dreamlike adventure that unravels the non-linear narrative of intense, intimate friendship bonds. Faces fade, boundaries blur, and connection takes on a whole new dimension - messy and unapologetically fluid, as the whole generation.
Bobbi Essers The World at Our Command is showing at Unit London, 28 September - 8 December.
