Aisha Pagnes is a visual artist based in The Hague, with a long-standing formation in fine and multimedia arts. She graduated from the Dutch Royal Academy of Art and holds a Cum Laude MA in Philosophy from Leiden University, specialising in aesthetics and philosophy of art. Her work has been presented in the Netherlands and internationally. Alongside her studio practice, she publishes, edits, and peer reviews in art criticism and aesthetics, and teaches at Dutch universities.
Her practice is driven by a sustained attempt to translate immediate experience into material form. Her work develops through direct engagement with matter, often using found or discarded materials that impose constraints on process and outcome. Although realised largely as painting, the approach is tactile and sculptural rather than pictorial.
Working in abstraction, she builds surfaces through repeated gestures of layering, stripping, heating, scorching, deliberately pushing material qualities—weight, drying time, opacity, fracture—until they shift state, and adjusting the work in response. When a surface becomes too fixed, it is destroyed and rebuilt. Each work is finished at the point where further action would collapse its structure, leaving visible the marks of negotiation rather than execution.
Subtle differences in density and texture emerge only through slow, dynamic looking. These are not decorative effects, but traces of pressure, repetition, and duration left in the material itself.
Her practice is driven by a sustained attempt to translate immediate experience into material form. Her work develops through direct engagement with matter, often using found or discarded materials that impose constraints on process and outcome. Although realised largely as painting, the approach is tactile and sculptural rather than pictorial.
Working in abstraction, she builds surfaces through repeated gestures of layering, stripping, heating, scorching, deliberately pushing material qualities—weight, drying time, opacity, fracture—until they shift state, and adjusting the work in response. When a surface becomes too fixed, it is destroyed and rebuilt. Each work is finished at the point where further action would collapse its structure, leaving visible the marks of negotiation rather than execution.
Subtle differences in density and texture emerge only through slow, dynamic looking. These are not decorative effects, but traces of pressure, repetition, and duration left in the material itself.