Michael Tedja
Experimentation is my natural habitat
Michael Tedja (1971, Netherlands) works across drawing, painting, literature, and installation. His expressive images, filled with symbols, handwritten elements, and autobiographical references, often recall the energetic visual language of CoBrA artists. Central to Tedja’s practice is a resistance to fixed meanings and labels. Rather than presenting identity as something stable or singular, he creates works in which multiple stories, voices, and associations exist alongside one another. Tedja openly criticises the expectation that artists of colour should primarily represent a community or explain their work through their background. Instead, he argues for artistic autonomy and complexity. His own family history, shaped by Creole-Hindustani roots, social differences, and experiences of exclusion, appears throughout his work, but never as a single narrative that defines it.
Influenced by the radical independence of punk culture, Tedja combines writing and painting as parallel forms of experimentation: poetry becomes a study of rhythm and language, while painting allows him to explore colour, gesture, and material in a direct and intuitive way.
