For Art Rotterdam 2026, Galerie Noah Klink, in collaboration with Galeria Catinca Tabacaru, present a solo booth by Xavier Robles de Medina in the
New Art Section (Booth K04).

At once rigorously research-driven and formally exacting, Xavier Robles de Medina’s practice un-folds through an intensive engagement with archives, images, and historical texts. Extended periods of investigation: spanning museum collections, colonial records, and vernacular visual culture, form the conceptual backbone of his work. This research is not treated as source material to be illustrated, but as a structure to be interrogated, fragmented, and reconstituted.
Focusing on the entangled histories of Suriname and the Netherlands, Robles de Medina examines how visual regimes produce and sustain narratives of power.
His works engage with monuments, ethnographic displays, and photographic archives as unstable constructs, subject to acts of translation, displacement, and re-imaging. In this process, images are neither preserved nor erased, but critically reconstructed, revealing the ideological frameworks embedded within them.
This conceptual approach is inseparable from a highly disciplined material practice.

Working across drawing, painting, text, and sculpture, Robles de Medina employs time-intensive processes that emphasize precision, repetition, and control. Each work operates as a carefully calibrated system in which visual clarity and conceptual complexity are held in tension, inviting sustained and attentive viewing.
Within this framework, autobiographical elements surface with particular resonance. Rather than functioning as anecdotal inserts, they complicate and expand the historical field, situating personal memory within broader diasporic and transnational contexts. The result is a body of work that resists fixed interpretation, instead proposing a dynamic space in which histories are continuously negotiated.

Robles de Medina’s work has gained increasing international recognition, with presentations across Europe and the United States and inclusion in major institutional collections. The presentation at Art Rotterdam offers a focused encounter with a practice that combines intellectual rigor, material precision, and a distinct visual language, positioning the artist as a compelling voice within a new generation engaging critically with history, image-making, and representation.

Text by Arwyn Coco Schenck