Brigitte Mulholland is thrilled to present 69 Paintings, a solo exhibition from Dorus Tossijn in the gallery’s Salon. The exhibition encompasses an intimate selection of exactly 69 paintings from 2017-2025; all at a small scale. Tossijn’s practice explores our contemporary, fast-paced, image-making culture through the process of slow and meticulous painting. Repetition with variation is a key element. Often working serially, he questions what we decide is good or beautiful.
The works are presented in a dynamic salon-style hang. There are a few diptychs; a ten-part painting depicting The top ten favourite colours in the world; and an eleven-part painting Travelling on, installed among a grid of 19 other paintings that also measure 15 x 10 cm. In this section are paintings with imagery culled from popular culture, the news, and materials the artist loves to work with, such as rust and gold. Among them are Ideal Man according to Men vs. Women and The most famous, the most expensive, the most reproduced and the start of modern art - a painting that depicts the Mona Lisa, the Salvatore Mundi, The Great Wave off Kanagara, and Manet’s Olympia. All four famous and influential paintings share the same aspect ratio, which the artist has deliberately applied to his own works The smallest painting in the exhibition, a still from a film of James Bond emerging from the water, measures 1.3 x 0.9 cm – approximately the size of a fingertip.
Another grid installation consists of 16 paintings from his series Tulips that start with the letter A. This body of work is a nod to the artist’s Dutch heritage, and consists of small, intricately painted images of every kind of tulip that begins with the letter A, each enclosed in a thick gold leaf frame and adorned with a brass plaque bearing the tulip’s name. Here the long pink swooping petals of Tulipa Aladdin, the quiet beauty of the simple white Tulipa Albatros, and the bold purple and fuschia of the Tulipa Aphrodite – all done at an intricate, miniature scale – evokes the majesty and mystery of nature, how dynamic and varied even one simple kind of flower can be, and how that diversity has been shaped and expanded through human hybridization.
Dorus Tossijn is based in London. He holds an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Arts and a BA from ArtEZ.