Miko Veldkamp (Miquel Rianto Veldkamp) is a Dutch-American painter of mixed Dutch-Indonesian ancestry. He was born in Surinam, grew up partly in The Netherlands and has been living in NYC for the past ten years. Veldkamp amalgamates cultural and visual elements from each place he has called home, into a dream-like world that transcends spatial and temporal boundaries. In doing so he reflects on race, privilege and historical relations. Applying light washes of colour and layering them to create varying degrees of translucency, the figures in his paintings often resemble himself, family members, or ghost-like entities. These shape-shifting and translucent pseudo- self portraits interact with each other in different roles, occupying a continually evolving psychological landscape of bicycles, dairy cows, nightclubs, checkered floors, forest spirits, tobacco and coca leaves. Playful, sensitive, dreamy and lucid, the paintings build homely and idyllic scenes that are reminiscent of Les Nabis and Expressionism. Veldkamp paints directly onto the canvas without preliminary studies or drawings, allowing the work to unfold spontaneously for the viewer. Parts of his paintings are intentionally left unrendered, allowing a glimpse into the process of building up of the paint and conveying a sense of time passing, creating portals into different cultural spheres.
He was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and a recipient of the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and in 2021 he graduated from the Hunter College MFA painting program. Recent exhibitions include: 'Finding my Blue Sky', group show Lisson Gallery, London (2025), ‘Buketan', Alice Amati, London (2024); ‘Postcards from Home’ BB&M Gallery, Seoul (2023); ‘Confetti in the Shade’, Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York (2023); ‘Long Distance’, Long Story Short, New York (2023); ‘Botany of Desire’, group show, Swivel Gallery, New York, (2023); ‘Just Play’, group show, The Here and There, New York, (2023); ‘Second Nature’, Southwark Park Galleries, London (2022); ‘Ghost Stories’, Workplace, London (2022); His work was recently featured in Artforum, New American Paintings, ArtMaze Magazine, Metropolis M and Juxtapoz amongst others.