MIKO VELDKAMP

Miko Veldkamp’s work serves as the inspiration for the latest release from Milan-based luxury brand Retori. Exploring fashion as a visual language and a personal narrative, the latest collection, titled Chapter 02, reflects the ideas and aesthetics of Veldkamp’s paintings, shaped by the richly layered cultural and emotional landscapes of a diasporic life, from Suriname to the Netherlands to now New York.

By turns playful and sensitive, his mesmerizing paintings typically feature intimate, idyllic scenes reminiscent of Les Nabis and Expressionism. At the same time, they resist the colonial gaze that has encoded cultural otherness along racial and geographic lines and through dichotomies of civilized versus savage.