Artists

Anna van der Ploeg

Press release

This April BEIGE will present new works by Anna van der Ploeg (b. 1992, Cape Town). This will be van der Ploeg's second solo exhibition at the gallery, following Cooler air holds the smoke together in 2025. A text by the author Hannah Walton will accompany the exhibition. Anna van der Ploeg explains what trigged the idea for the exhibition: "The paintings are influenced by taking the Ethiopian Airlines flight home at the end of the year. All transfer flights head to Addis Ababa and the disperse – it's a very specific route, that I get to experience at a very specific time of year. Seeing a diaspora of people working in Europe head to Addis and then split off in every direction to different parts of Africa gives me, as an African working in Europe, a sense of all the other lives that have charted a similar path away from home. There's a different feeling than with flights on more business-type routes, or at other times of the year. One year I flew just before Christmas, and the plane was full of babies, everyone taking their newborns home to show the family for the first time. There's something universally wretched about all air travel, and how dehumanising the process has become, but on a flight that is more about homecoming than city-hopping, you catch glimpses of people's double lives and the rewards and sacrifices of expatriation. The airline is also one of the only ones that revised its rules around participating in deportation, after some activism called it out." Anna van der Ploeg lives and works in Brussels and South Africa. Anna van der Ploeg obtained her Bachelor's Degree with Honours in Fine Arts at the Michalis School of Fine Arts, University of Cape Town and Master's degree at KASK Royal Academy of Art in Gent, where she was awarded the Leu de Legaat Award for Fine Arts. She has held solo exhibitions in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Brussels, Leuven, Melbourne and New York and participated in numerous group shows internationally. In 2023 she was the artist in residence at Museum M, Leuven; in 2024 at Reservoir Projects in Cape Town and in 2025 at La Cambre, Brussels. Alongside her painting, sculptural and printmaking practice, van der Ploeg excersises writing and experimental visualisation sessions.