Atelier Van Lieshout it is an artistic collective founded in 1995 by Dutch artist Joep Van Lieshout, known for his multidisciplinary and provocative approach. The collective's work spans sculpture, design, and architecture, exploring themes related to self-sufficiency, utopia, society, and sustainability, often with an ironic and bold visual language.
In 2000, Atelier Van Lieshout participated in the 4th edition of Art to Art with the project Arms and Bombs Workshop, presented in Montalcino. The work, true to the collective's poetics, explored the relationship between art, society, and tools of conflict, transforming the historical and cultural context of the place into a ground for critical reflection.
Atelier Van Lieshout is now internationally recognised for its capacity to merge art and functionality, challenging conventions and proposing alternative visions of contemporary living.
Atelier Van Lieshout is the studio founded by sculptor and visionary Joep van Lieshout. After graduating from the Rotterdam Art Academy, Van Lieshout quickly became famous with projects that straddled the line between the world of easily reproducible design and the non-functional realm of art: sculpture and installations, buildings and furniture, utopias and dystopias.
In 1995, Van Lieshout founded his studio and has since worked exclusively under the studio's name. The studio moniker exists in Van Lieshout's practice as a methodology for undermining the myth of the artistic genius. Over the last three decades, Van Lieshout has established a multidisciplinary studio producing works on the border between art, design, and architecture. Investigating the fine line between manufactured art and serial functional objects, they seek to find the boundaries between fantasy and function, between fertility and destruction.
Van Lieshout dissects systems, whether it be society as a whole or the human body; he experiments, looks for alternatives and stages exhibitions as experiments in recycling, and even declared an independent state in the port of Rotterdam, AVL-Ville (2001), a free state in the port of Rotterdam, with minimal rules, maximum freedom and the highest degree of self-sufficiency. All these activities are conducted within Van Lieshout's typical style of provocation, be it political or material.
Van Lieshout combines a fanciful aesthetic and ethic with an entrepreneurial spirit; his work has motivated movements in architecture and ecology, and has been celebrated, exhibited, and published internationally. His works share a series of recurring themes, motifs, and obsessions: systems, power, autarchy, life, sex and death – each of these tracing the human individual in the face of a larger whole, such as his famous work Domestikator (2015). This sculpture caused controversy even before it was placed at the Louvre in the Jardin des Tuileries, but it was adopted by the Centre Pompidou, where it was shown during the FIAC (2017).