Blue Shop Gallery presents
William van Hoorn
‘Darn That Dream’
Gallery 2
16th September - 3rd October 2026
PV Wednesday 16th September 6-8pm 2026
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Gallery opening hours:
Thu - Sat | 12pm - 5pm or by appointment
William van Hoorn (b. 2000, London) is a British–Spanish abstract painter whose practice investigates notions of purity, conscience, and perception through a sustained engagement with the natural world. Nature functions not merely as subject matter, but as a pedagogical and metaphysical framework through which questions of balance, beauty, and relationality are explored.
His work considers the underlying structures and rhythms that govern natural phenomena, seeking to translate these intangible forces into abstract visual form. Informed by the formal sensibilities of early- and mid-twentieth-century art and design, van Hoorn employs a design-led approach that balances intuition with order, allowing compositions to emerge through a process of observation, reflection, and response.
Central to his practice is an understanding of the canvas as a site of negotiation. Oil paint enables a slower, more contemplative mode of working, in which forms reveal themselves through prolonged attention and the gradual interplay of colour, shape, and space. Rather than privileging a singular focal point, van Hoorn seeks to establish a dynamic equilibrium in which each element retains its own presence while contributing to the coherence of the whole.
The resulting compositions draw upon the logic of ecological systems, where coexistence is shaped through reciprocity, adaptation, and interdependence. Like organisms competing for light within a shared environment, forms assert themselves while remaining subject to the demands of the wider field. Through this process, van Hoorn's paintings become meditations on the relationship between perception and consciousness, proposing abstraction as a means of approaching the unseen orders that connect human experience to the natural world.
Darn That Dream
William Van Hoorn’s artistic practice is a meditation on how encounter determines style. Unlike those who pull from the peculiar movements inside the self to give a strange and random experience some recognisable form, Van Hoorn allows experience to remain strange and random, balancing what is discovered through colour, shape, and spatial relation until a vague portrait of the artist emerges. For Van Hoorn, creating artworks is a process of decoding that produces forms and not explanations. Within every painting are a multitude of experiences that take form according to how they were encountered, and it isn’t until an independent form is placed in relation with others across the pictorial field that the independent character of a form becomes announced. This is because Van Hoorn works according to the philosophy of ‘Relationality,’ believing that nothing first exists with an independent identity, and that everything must come together in a context for meaning to appear, even if meaning itself remains unintelligible. Through this repeated process of encounter and formation, decoding and relation, Van Hoorn has developed a distinct visual language that is both intelligent and intangible.
Despite their minimalist construction, each form possesses an unmistakable, exaggerated Surrealist character. Circles, spikes, organic contours and other ambiguous shapes appear across the paintings with a familiarity of things discovered in the natural world, without ever
settling into anything genuinely recognisable. When completed, the works begin to resemble celestial landscapes or diagrams of unknown natural orders, and these associations with the natural world of objects and things are recognised by Van Hoorn himself, referenced in titles for paintings such as Cosmic Lullaby (In Green), 2026, Spring Fragments, 2026, and Solar Composition, 2026.
A soft, sufficient tension can be felt within each painting's equilibrium as radically independent shapes are brought into an organised chaos that is harmoniously discordant. Some forms appear incompatible with each other, and some are obstructed by large bands of colour going across the picture plane. Yet colour, scale, position and shape reconcile all the forms we see so that each form is accommodated and none totally dominates any other. It is this precise accommodation of each form that produces a non-hierarchical order to the paintings that feels discovered and not imposed. The viewer's eye is therefore given no point on which to settle and is allowed to move freely and comfortably across the canvas until a quiet logic within the paintings is felt.
That feeling of running away,
the Oh , so familiar feeling!
Cloud with the spiked thorns-
that which birthed this running,
my thoughts hackneyed by that darn’ thing!
When one runs so far
they forget thorns and clouds
Blue beautiful bliss
that which I cannot touch
Which will be mine,
as I carry on running?
Darn that dream
hello@blueshopcottage.com for all catalogue requests.
‘Cosmic Lullaby (In Green)’
William van Hoorn
2026
Oil on Jute
80 x 80 cm
‘Undone Dream’
William van Hoorn
2026
Oil on Jute
50 x 40 cm