{Natalia Ossef} Biography {Movement Exposed Gallery Space}

Biography

In her work, Natalia Ossef questions the intimate relationship between the individual and the context in which it finds itself: a collective, a landscape, the past or the present. In her artistic research, her body plays a central role. Furthermore she makes use of found objects and historical symbols. Her drawings, photographs and installations emphasise how personal identity depends on the environment and is always in flux and development.

In recent years, Natalia Ossef has participated in various group exhibitions: Heem at the Fries Museum (2025 – with the work Garden of Paradise (2015)); Good Mom, Bad Mom (2025) at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht and Aan de rand van de Hemel: Visioenen (2023 – 2024) at Museum Krona in Uden. In her solo exhibition Reflecting Reflections (2021) at Centraal Museum Utrecht, Ossef explored how the past permeates the present. Curator and critic Hanna Hagenaars wrote an essay for this exhibition, which she later published in her book Missen als een ronde vorm (2023).

Natalia Ossef graduated from the HKU in Utrecht in 2011 and obtained her Honours Master of Visual Arts at the Sint Lucas School for the Arts in Antwerp in 2019. In the meantime, she regularly exhibited in Utrecht, Amsterdam and beyond, including in Basel, Berlin, New York and Paris. Her work is included in public collections at the Centraal Museum, ING Art Collection (Netherlands), Eskff Collection (United States) and CCA Andratx (Spain), as well as in private collections in Europe, North America and South America.

Since the exhibition Before It Stirs the Surface in 2021, Movement Exposed Gallery Space has regularly shown Natalia Ossef’s work. In collaboration with and at Bradwolff Projects in Amsterdam, the exhibition As The Veils Get Thinner (2023) was presented. As part of the exhibition Ar’a, she specially created the installation Seeds / Origin (2025) at Movement Exposed Gallery Space. Seeds / Origin was a further elaboration of the impressions she gained during an artistic residency in southern Turkey, which borders her birthplace and that of her ancestors in the Aramean part of Syria.