Mirjam Berloth is a visual artist, based in Amsterdam.

Plaster and Paint is made of shards of plaster, carefully collected and sorted by size and colour. The chips are arranged on blocks of wood, then finished with a glossy varnish.
These wall sculptures, when presented in a horizontal position, represent landscapes, while positioned vertically one may be reminded of bark and trees. 

Mirjam Berloth studied graphical design, printmaking and painting in the Netherlands. She graduated with an installation, the main topic being ‘Looking’ and ‘seeing’.

Passing on to working 3-dimensional she developed ideas about “what a space needs” in site specific art. Her first residencies were in Eindhoven (NL), at Apollohuis and De Overslag, soon followed by stays in Germany, Poland and France where she collaborated with international artists.

“What does a situation need?” was made visual at a performance festival on contextual art in Warsaw where she twisted and tied  A4-typing paper into a long rope. The performers participated in twisting the paper while waiting for their stage call. In the end the Paper Rope had reached almost a kilometer.

Before real estate started booming Amsterdam had many empty spaces: deserted shopfronts, stores and basements was where artists found a raw environment for their experiments with projection, sound and transience. For 10 years Berloth organized events in these spaces. 

Nowadays the artist is back in her own quiet studio working on sculptures made of salvaged and left over materials. With Lisbeth Parisius she founded POUBELLE, the beauty of waste material a collective of artists who work with discarded materials in a minimal way. 

Mirjam Berloth (Aruba, 1963) lives and works in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She is a member of De Vishal Haarlem, Kunstverein and Arti et Amicitiae.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Mirjam Berloth is inspired by creative processes from the previous century, when abstract art was still questioning how to live together, how to relate to other artists and to art history, how to sustain in a field dominated by men.

Movements like Colour Field Painting, Zero, Land Art and Arte Povera show how it is possible to be an artist who is both autonomous and at the same time concerned with creating a better world; how social concepts can be represented in abstract images.

By taking a less strict and more playful approach,  Mirjam Berloth is making her own contemporary artworks with modern art history in mind.