Tjalf Sparnaay - BREAKFAST by the artist of the year 2024, beautifully framed

new wooden frame with museum art glass
Offset printing is a technique in which printing plates (often made of aluminium) are placed in the printing press. These plates are exposed to the print. You need a separate printing plate for each print colour. The plates are then moistened and all unexposed parts absorb this moisture.
Since 1987 Tjalf Sparnaay has been working on an innovative oeuvre, always searching for other, never before painted images. His Megarealism is part of the contemporary and international movement called Hyperrealism, within which he is now internationally regarded as one of the important and trendsetting painters.
His work is in collections all over the world and is regularly exhibited outside the Netherlands, including in New York. In the Netherlands, he had his first solo museum exhibition in 2015 at Museum de Fundatie, and his work has also been exhibited in the Kunsthal, Rotterdam, and in various other museums.
A number of works were part of the international retrospective exhibition 50 years of Hyperrealistic painting, which travelled through the USA and Europe.
His Fried Eggs are iconic and are used and painted as an image all over the world.
He has now become the leading contemporary Food painter in the world and can call himself an exhibiting artist at the prestigious Louis K. Meisel Gallery in New York, where Photorealism / Hyperrealism originated in the 1960s/70s.
Hamburgers, fries, sandwiches, ketchup bottles, marbles and lobster, he brings these kinds of trivial subjects into focus and blows them up to enormous size, like thunderbolts on our retinas.
He not only documents reality, but intensifies it by blowing up everyday objects to mega proportions. This gives him the opportunity to explore every detail very closely and dissect it layer by layer in order to get to the core of the subject. “My paintings,” he states, “are intended to enable the viewer to experience reality again, to rediscover the essence of the object that has become so commonplace. I want to reduce it to the DNA of the universal structure, in all its beauty.” The way he works refers directly to the seventeenth century. In his lucid use of colour and eye for detail and refinement, he comes close to Vermeer, while the lighting in his paintings refers to the play of light and shadow in the work of Rembrandt. Sparnaay builds on the rich seventeenth-century Dutch tradition of still life, but does so in an idiosyncratic and contemporary way. He is always looking for new, never-before-painted images. He finds this in his own environment: “By using trivial and everyday objects, I let this almost forgotten reality flow from my brush again.”