In his work, the Rotterdam artist Nazif Lopulissa (1991) – winner of the Henri Winkelman Award 2018 – explores the language of forms of objects, places and situations from his daily life. In Kunsthal Light #18 he presents a series of works in which he explores and transforms elements of the playground. Playgrounds is a personal journey in search of an important phenomenon from his childhood: the playground.

For Lopulissa the playground is a place of contradictions in which form, appearance, function and use seem to contradict one another all the time. By painting the brightly coloured, hard material of the playground items on classic cotton, Lopulissa takes away their materiality and emphasises form and colour.

Lopulissa takes details from the playground and converts them into unrecognisable abstract patterns. He zooms in on fences, grids, bars and rubber tiles, painting them over on another in abstract compositions.

After graduating from the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam in 2017, Lopulissa set out to prove his worth as an artist. He set his sights high and tried to see his freedom to choose from many options not as an obstacle but as an opportunity to focus on new work. The presentation in Kunsthal Light marks the start of a new phase, the beginning of an exploration of painting that can result in interactive sculptures.