Strangled Mermaids

Doris Kolpa

20 - 21 SEPT 2025

Doris Kolpa (1996) is a Rotterdam-based artist and alumnus from the St. Joost Academy. Kolpa's paintings often depict women resting or playing in nature which are disrupted by mechanical or patriarchal intrusions. This duality gives the image an eerie and alienating presence. She draws inspiration from folklore, actuality, pop culture, the painting tradition and her own subjectivity, merging them into an image which seems to take place in between something mythical, normal and disturbing.

Strangled Mermaids exhibits 15 years of paintings and writings, interweaving old and new works to create a time span dialogue on womanhood. “As a girl I’d spent hours drawing the woman depicted in my schoolbooks. The 17th century house wives, Marie Antoinette, Anne Frank and Sophia Loren. Through their facial expressions, bodily postures, the clothes they’d wear or the way they’d do their hair, I was trying to unveil the stories I couldn’t find in the accompanying texts. Now as a woman I built a whole artistic practice around the subject of women and trying to understand and position the time through their figures.” 

Strangled Mermaids

Today I cried until I baptized myself into a baby

Staring at a piece of handwriting

I found between the clutter at the attic

Seeking for myself in the bleu outliers 

Sinking back to the orange colored days 

My flat teenage tummy and a pink patterned underpants 

Begging all the sticky seaweed arms for salvation 

choke me kill me heal me 

They made it into a bet 

A tenner on the fatherless girl 

A tenner on society being build up by iron marriages and purchases houses 

A tenner on the rental houses and yearnings for a home 

A tenner on the iron lying arms and the iron fake rings 

A tenner on the whore 

You bet you bet

my father is looking over me now 

I met him as some digital numbers

Without any worry I can buy myself cigarets now 

And cut your sticky seaweed arms 

Eat and spit your salty cravings