Leo Wijnhoven

Leo Wijnhoven works with social, economic, political and scientific developments in the post-modern world, including globalism and its effects on identity, free-market fundamentalism and mass consumption, media spectacle, and the end of Western modernism and its hierarchical relationship to nature. Rather than pursuing personal expression, his work focuses on communication and changing consciousness, employing a broad range of styles based on realism.

His practice examines Western modernism critically—its dualism of body and mind, its rationalism, materialism, mechanism, and reductionism—and seeks new assumptions where modernistic thinking has proven insufficient. He observes that while quantum mechanical theories, based on assumptions opposite to modernism, have informed technical inventions for over a century, contemporary mentality remains modernistic: global rather than local, short-term rather than long-term, large-scale rather than small-scale, and oriented toward exploitation rather than balance. He views this persistent mindset as underlying many current problems, particularly climate change and financial-economic systems.