Chris Nelck (2003, Delft, NL) is a Rotterdam-based visual artist. His practice utilizes painting, text and performance, exploring intimacy, the body and radical openness through a trans and queer perspective. Nelck approaches the personal as political material, making shame, desire and vulnerability explicit as acts of both resistance and connection.
Text plays a central role in his work, often extending the image to create narratives that balance between fiction and autobiography. Nelck's practice is characterized by a direct and embodied visual language in which fragility and strength exist simultaneously.
Nelck graduated cum laude in Fine Art from the Willem de Kooning Academy and completed an exchange at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo). His work has been exhibited at Brutus (Rotterdam), Galerie Ron Mandos (Amsterdam) and Kunstliefde (Utrecht). In 2026, he was selected for Muzen van Morgen, an initiative by AVROTROS supporting emerging artists.
Chris Nelck
chrisnelck@gmail.com
Based in Rotterdam
chrisnelck@gmail.com
Based in Rotterdam
My face is like an open book, people have told me this repeatedly throughout my life. My emotions are upfront and my features speak before I do.
I frown without thinking and smile without knowing.
My practice works in much the same way, I am open and direct. My secrets, shame, desires and emotions are there for everyone to see. I call this radical openness. For me, radical openness is a form of activism.
When I paint, I often feel like I am building a bridge between myself and the viewer. My paintings allow me to share personal and intimate emotions and feel at peace with doing so. They are hairy and vulnerable. Powerful and fragile.
Giovanni’s Womb -- 2026
Giovanni's Womb is an interdisciplinary work comprising of a series of paintings, performance, video and text. The starting point is a fictional self-portrait in which Nelck depicts himself as a pregnant trans man. Pregnancy appears here as an image that carries discomfort, care, conflict and beauty all at once. The performance is set within the cathedral of Brutus in Rotterdam and follows a fictional pregnant trans figure in a world of blue smoke and lilies. The body caresses and wanders like a moving painting, while a poem guides the viewer. Blue smoke and red lilies return throughout the installation as recurring motifs, drawing from Richard Bruce Nugent's Smoke, Lilies and Jade (1926).
The work is a direct response to James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and the tragic queer literature of the 1960s–80s. Rather than dwelling in the past, Giovanni's Womb imagines speculative futures for trans bodies, reproduction and care. Pregnancy appears as both beautiful and conflicting, and lets all emotions; positive and negative, exist peacefully together.
Giovanni's Womb invites the viewer to remain with contradiction and to reimagine trans embodiment, care and the possibilities of the body.
Groen is iets,
blauw is het niets --- 2025
NL:
Tussen oer-Hollandse plakplinten en Noorse bossen ontstaat een stille sterrenhemel.
Dit werk richt zich op het vastleggen en eren van kleine momenten. De polaroidfoto’s zijn direct op het werk bevestigd, zoals foto's in Noorse hyttes aan de muur worden gehangen: zonder glas, vaak eenvoudig omlijst met de hand gespijkerd hout. In deze directe, huiselijke manier van ophangen worden herinneringen vereeuwigd.
De beelden tonen landschappen, sporen van aanwezigheid en details uit het dagelijkse buitenleven. Het werk reflecteert op vertraging, aandacht en de waarde van het alledaagse, en stelt de vraag hoe we herinneren wat ooit was.
ENG:
Between Dutch skirting boards and Norwegian forests, a quiet starry sky emerges.
This work explores the act of capturing and honoring small moments. The Polaroid photographs are mounted directly onto the piece, much like photos in Norwegian hyttes are placed on walls: without glass, often simply framed with hand-nailed wood. In this direct, domestic way of displaying, memories are made permanent.
The images show landscapes, traces of presence, and details from everyday life outdoors. The work reflects on slowness, attention, and the value of the ordinary, and asks how we remember what once was.
