Art Rotterdam 2026

Booth C15

March 26-29, 2026

Efrat Zehavi
José Heerkens
Sculpture Park Art Rotterdam:
Herman Lamers

Efrat Zehavi (1974) is a visual and performance artist based in Rotterdam. She is known for the expressive portraits in coloured plasticine that she makes on the spot in public locations. Efrat draws, sculpts, makes collages and writes short stories based on oral histories. She combines her texts and artifacts in installations, performances, animations and books.

Efrat’s sculptures are painterly and narrative. She works with sculptural media like plasticine, clay, papier-mâché, plaster and wax. With these materials she can shape her feelings and thoughts in the most direct and intuitive way, as if making a quick sketch. Efrat’s sincere sculptures derive their power from the unmistakable imprint of her hand.
The sculptures depict a wide variety of characters, from recognisable realistic portraits to theatrical masks, deformed bodies, mythological figures, marionettes, and mascot-like objects, but finally all human forms.
Efrat’s work deals with existential issues like origins, family relationships and migration. She often depicts unpleasant or painful feelings, but she always does so with some humor. Her performative projects rely on audience participation, seeking to provoke a dialogue between strangers. In cafés, libraries, studio-like settings or around a table with ritual objects, she guides the conversation to embrace personal subjects like family history and relationships. In this way many universal emotions and feelings are revealed. The people involved can feel connected with each other regardless of their origin, background or religion. Efrat holds a BA from the Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem, and an MA from the University of Plymouth in collaboration with Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. In 2007 she was artist in residence at EKWC, European Ceramic Centre in 's-Hertogenbosch. In 2023 she was commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science to make a bronze bust of the Dutch Nobel Prize Winner Guido Imbens, and for the permanent collection of FENIX, museum of migration in Rotterdam, she made more than a hundred plasticine portraits of inhabitants of Rotterdam (2020 – 2023).

Interview Suzanne Swarts with Efrat Zehavi

The Dutch painter José Heerkens (b.1950), known for her refined minimalist language in which colour and line carry equal weight.

Heerkens paints primarily in oil on linen stretched over aluminium and wooden frames, and uses acrylic and watercolour for works on paper. Her practice is driven by a search for space, drawing on the traditions of minimal and concrete art. Through systematic principles combined with intuitive exploration, she investigates how colour, line, light and form create balance, concentration and intensity.

In her own words, each painting arises from “a balancing dialogue between a line and the movement of colour,” where lines shape space and colours gain form and energy. On her canvases, precisely tuned colours align with grids and rhythms, while areas of unpainted linen keep the work open and spatial—inviting the viewer’s eye to move through shifting hues, lines and subtle variations in paint.

Her work is included in museum and private collections in the Netherlands and abroad, and has been widely exhibited across Europe, the US, China and Australia.
In 2023 the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterloo organised a solo exhibition. It was accompanied by a catalogue designed by Irma Boom.

Art History 20th Century

Febuary 15 - March 29, 2026

opening: Sunday 15 Febuary 15.00 hrs

Man Ray
Marcel Broodthaers
Bernd and Hilla Becher
Slothouber & Graatsma
Lotti van der Gaag
Milan Kunc
Peter Angermann
Jan Dibbets
Bob Bonies
Éva Besnyő
Alfred Kubin