What does freedom look like when it is captured? In their oil paintings and ballpoint pen drawings, Bobbi Essers (2000) and Robin Wen (1994) each depict, in their own way, their generation’s desire for freedom. Their work takes us from languid evenings with friends to parties that continue until the early hours.
With great technical skill, both artists create hushed, cinematic snapshots. By carefully choosing what they show – and, just as importantly, what they leave out – their images say more than they reveal.
Fragments of a shared world
Essers bases her oil paintings on analogue photographs of her friends. Working on a large-scale, she meticulously captures abruptly cropped fragments of her world: a shoulder, an earring, a strand of hair, an embrace. These details are interwoven into images that feel like memories of a heady evening – impressions that linger long after the night has ended.
By depicting her subjects at such close range, Essers creates a palpable sense of intimacy. Gender and identity are often deliberately left ambiguous, allowing her personal world to open up to broader identification. Her work exudes queer positivity: on her canvases, people are immortalized as their full selves.
Essers captures the spirit of Generation Z: the adventure, idleness and love. In her crops and unexpected juxtapositions lies something both deeply personal and widely recognizable – the magic of friendship.
Nightlife in blue lines
Where Essers depicts the intimacy of her immediate surroundings, Wen immerses himself in the world of Free Party and rave culture: free, often illegal gatherings where young people come together in search of ecstasy and escape.
He renders this untamed world with remarkable technical precision. Wen primarily works with a seemingly everyday medium: the blue ballpoint pen. Textures, light and facial expressions are depicted with near-photographic accuracy. The characteristic blue glow lends his work an uncanny atmosphere: nightlife appears to detach itself from ordinary reality.
Wen’s images feature deserted party sites in the morning light and faceless dancing figures. This absence becomes a strength: the unknown, the intangible, the tension between exuberance and stillness, between collectivity and solitude. His work stands as a testament to a subculture that balances between the fantastic and the everyday.
Open-ended snapshots
Essers and Wen present their realities as deliberately open-ended fragments. In Essers’ work, space emerges through what is omitted: identity blurs, details take over. In Wen’s work, the unfamiliar is embraced: empty spaces and anonymous bodies emphasize the fleeting nature of freedom.
Both artists share a fascination with the moment – that instant when time seems to stand still. Their works are not complete narratives; rather, they invite the viewer to imagine and draw connections.
In a time when images follow one another at a relentless pace, Essers and Wen slow the gaze. They make visible the fleeting nature of their generation’s lives, allowing it simply to exist in all its vulnerability, intensity and beauty.
About Robin Wen
Robin Wen (Taiwan, 1994) lives and works in Brussels. He graduated from La Cambre, the Belgian National School of Visual Arts, in 2018, and won the Woluwe-Saint-Pierre Arts Prize for his drawings. His work – hyperrealistic ballpoint pen drawings rooted in Free Party and rave culture – has since featured at international fairs and exhibitions. This is the first time his work is being shown in a Dutch museum.
About Bobbi Essers
Bobbi Essers (Enschede, 2000) lives and works in Amsterdam. She graduated from HKU University of Arts Utrecht in 2022, and obtained her Master’s from the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen in 2024. In 2023, she received the Royal Award for Modern Painting. Essers has regularly participated in exhibitions in the Netherlands and abroad, including in the group exhibition Reality Check at Museum MORE in 2025.
