Gijs van Lith (b. 1984, Netherlands) is a Dutch artist who lives and works in Eindhoven. He studied Fine Art at AKV St. Joost in ’s-Hertogenbosch, completing his BA in 2008 and his MFA in 2013. His work was recognised early in his career through several nominations and awards, including the Thieme Art Young Talent Award in 2009. Van Lith has exhibited extensively in the Netherlands and internationally, with presentations at institutions such as Kunsthal Rotterdam, Het Noordbrabants Museum and MOYA Museum, as well as exhibitions in New York, London, Berlin, Brussels and Palma de Mallorca.
Van Lith’s practice is centred on painting as a physical, material and intuitive process. Rather than treating the canvas as a neutral support, he considers its surface and structure as integral to the work. His paintings are built through successive layers that are added, scraped, sanded and rubbed away, producing dense surfaces marked by irregularities, openings and traces of previous gestures. The history of each painting’s construction therefore remains visibly embedded within the work.
Working primarily within abstraction, Van Lith translates experiences and observations from everyday life into colour, texture and movement. His approach shifts between conscious decision-making and instinctive action, allowing accident and deliberate gesture to coexist. The resulting works possess a raw, energetic quality, recalling traditions of Abstract Expressionism and European gestural abstraction while maintaining a distinctly contemporary visual language.
Although painting remains central to his practice, Van Lith also works with sculpture and installation, often questioning the conventional limits of the painted object. In installations such as Thinner Spirits at Kunsthal Rotterdam, unstretched and draped canvases extend painting into architectural space, blurring distinctions between image and object. Through layering, destruction and reconstruction, Van Lith creates works that retain the energy of their making and remain suspended between spontaneity and reflection, permanence and transformation.
