104GALERIE (Nakameguro, Tokyo) is opening Another Room by Helen Verhoeven from June 7th (Sat.) to July 5th (Sat.) 2025. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in Japan.

In Verhoeven’s work, all of the strength, the impotence and faults of humanity exist within the same sphere. The subject of her paintings is the confusion, despair, desire, aggression and isolation that lay under the surface in our daily lives, though glimpses of strangeness and humor give all this turmoil a kind of light-heartedness.

Verhoeven’s unique view of the world has been shaped by experiences witnessed in her youth. She was born in Holland in 1974 but moved to Los Angeles at the age of 12. There she had to integrate into a wildly different world full of American discrepancies and extremes: confronting severe economic inequality, school violence, a national mental health crisis and ramped drug abuse. After graduating, she studied at the San Francisco Art Institute during which time she volunteered in a homeless shelter, in emergency rooms, ambulances and an abortion clinic. Through these many confrontations with the heartbreaking harshness of reality, she collected an endless well of stories but also –and especially– feelings; these form the bedrock of her work.

In her new paintings for the exhibition Another Room, Verhoeven depicts private moments that, as the title implies, might be taking place elsewhere, out of view. This directs some questions: Where, in these paintings, are we actually? Is it real or imagined? Staged or remembered? What, if anything, is happening and have we chosen to be here? Or are we somehow confined or destined to? These are questions about our circumstances, about our choices, our behaviours and, ultimately, about freedom.