Bram Reijnders is a Dutch artist whose practice begins not in the studio but on the streets — roaming the city at night to tear posters from walls, gathering the layered, weathered remnants of public communication as the raw material for his work. These fragments — what he calls "urban jungle leftovers," the physical residue of messages, information, and protest left by the city's inhabitants — are then refined by chopping and burning, combined with paint and glazes, and assembled into works of considerable visual complexity and cultural charge.
The technique has a name and a history. Décollage — the practice of tearing, cutting, or removing layers from an existing surface — was first developed in France by artists associated with Nouveau Réalisme, who, like Reijnders, wanted to hold up a multi-faceted mirror to contemporary society. Where collage adds material, décollage removes it, revealing what lies beneath: the previous message, the earlier image, the layer of meaning that was covered over. The resulting works carry aesthetic, historical, and social value built into their physical foundation rather than applied to a neutral surface.
His process sets up a dialogue with contemporary culture — appropriating a literal part of the city's visual life and using it alongside traditional media to examine celebrity, nostalgia, cultural differentiation, and the nature of art itself. "My personal influences are fed by the intensity of abstract expressionism and the pop dimension of everyday products, news and objects," he has said.
Born and based in the Netherlands, his career transformed when an unexpected appearance on a national television programme led to his entire studio selling out overnight. His work has been in consistent demand since. Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.
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