Esteemed gallery St Vincents is pleased to announce the Solo Show debut exhibition by Nick Valentijn, a sculptor, designer, maker and artist based in Maastricht, The Netherlands. Working with metal and wood, Valentijn creates domestic objects such as cabinets and seating that evolve beyond their typologies through the act of making. St Vincents presents a VIP preview on Thursday, June 5 from 6 to 9 PM and public opening Saturday, June 7 from 2 to 6 pm at Kleine Markt 13 in Antwerp, Belgium. The presentation will run through Saturday, September 20.
The Solo Show presents 12 pieces, including three from Valentijn’s 2024 graduation project, exploring the tension between function and form, rawness and restraint. For Valentijn, the process of creation happens in a continuous flow—from sketch to cut to weld—with no intermediate steps to dilute the initial impulse. “I start with quick, one-line sketches. No top, no side, no measurements. Just enough to hold an idea,” he says. “If it sticks with me, then I know I have to make it.”
Initially drawn to clay for its immediacy and responsiveness, Valentijn’s early experiments continue to inform his approach to metal. For Valentijn, welding is more conversation than technique, with the material pushing back and guiding the form’s evolution. The designer views metal’s stubbornness as its virtue—the way it warps under heat, develops unpredictable patinas and demands constant negotiation. Each piece is a discourse with material, pressure and timing, leaving behind visible seams, soft warps and a quiet refusal to resolve. “I don’t force the material. I let it do its thing. If the plates don’t meet, I cut a piece off and see how it flows. If something’s off, I just fix it,” he says.
These works resemble familiar objects such as a cabinet, a sofa and a candle holder, but their use does not define them. Instead, Valentijn asks what happens when function loosens its grip. He discovers what remains is form, held lightly. A sofa resists comfort, a cabinet denies storage, and a candle holder sits on the floor, monopolizing space — these objects flirt with type but drift toward autonomy. “I like to see how far I can strip function away before an object becomes something else entirely,” he says.
The Solo Show traces its lineage back to a seminal body of work that Valentijn built in his grandfather’s old metal workshop that was developed for his final year at the Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts and Design in 2024. The new body of work continues the trajectory first mapped in Valentijn’s graduation project. Now working from a rural Dutch farmhouse, Valentijn’s pieces for his Solo Show carry that same balance of immediacy and restraint — shaped by heat, hand, and environment. Each piece on view is part of a series of unique works, each individually handmade and based on general dimensions, ensuring that no two are exactly alike.
“These works are, in essence, timelines,” say curators and St Vincents’ founders Henri Delbarre and Geraldine Jackman. “Unlike mass-produced design, where process is erased, Valentijn’s pieces celebrate their becoming. They ask us to consider not just what we see, but how it came to be.”
Photography by Alexander Popelier
