Chaim van Luit
Chaim van Luit studied at the Academy of Fine Arts & Design and the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, the Netherlands. In 2013 he was nominated for the Volkskrant Visual Arts Award and the Van Bommel van Dam Award. Places where his work has been exhibited include Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht and P/////AKT in Amsterdam.
Graffiti and roaming around forests and European cities are what determined the teenage years of Chaim van Luit. He was also formed by his time spent as a sailor with the Royal Marines. Travelling still plays an important role in his current artistic practice: the source of his works can always be found beyond the walls of his atelier. Sometimes he literally appropriates elements of the landscape, at other times he simply takes his unconventional materials from it. In other cases he makes subtle changes in the environment.
This urge to explore is coupled with a fascination for (military) history. For instance, Van Luit sampled pigment from the walls of German military bunkers along the border. While the purpose of the paint used to be to secrete the bunkers in the landscape, Van Luit exposes the material in murals. He also collected old signposts in the underground marl mines surrounding Maastricht. His work, similarly to graffiti, is a combination of searching for clues while also leaving them behind.