Dennis Tyfus - Oi on Canvas

Tim Van Laere Gallery is pleased to announce Oi on Canvas, the new solo show of Belgian artist Dennis Tyfus. This is the third solo show of Tyfus since joining Tim Van Laere Gallery in 2021 and his first show in our Roman space. In this exhibition he will present his paintings for the first time to the public.

Born in Antwerp in 1979, Dennis Tyfus is a shape-shifter of contemporary art—an artist, musician, publisher, and performer whose work resists categorization. With a practice that flows freely between drawing, sculpture, installation, music, tattooing, video, publishing, and live performance, Tyfus creates an ever-expanding, self-sustaining universe where each medium cross-pollinates the other.

At the heart of Tyfus’s work is a spirit of improvisation, irreverence, and play. Rooted in the ethos of DIY and underground culture, he transforms constraints into opportunities and the unexpected into a driving force. His imagery often emerges from hypnagogic states—those moments between wakefulness and sleep—resulting in surreal, dreamlike compositions tinged with humor, absurdity, and a hint of menace. His influences, ranging from the Situationists to improvisation - from Dieter Roth to Mike Kelley, are refracted through his own unique sensibility, producing works that are at once deeply personal and widely resonant.

With Oi on Canvas, Tyfus extends his restless, genre-defying practice into the realm of painting, approaching the medium with the same unfiltered energy that defines his music, performances, and installations. He maintains his signature balance between the absurd, the poetic, and the confrontational. These works - simultaneously narrative yet intimate and estranged, familiar and foreign - capture moments that feel like fragments of overheard dreams. Rather than treating painting as a fixed or sacred form, he uses it as another stage for his improvisational sensibility, allowing figures, landscapes, and symbols to emerge organically, often from half-remembered dreams or fleeting images lodged in the subconscious. The result is a body of work where the absurd rubs shoulders with the poetic, and the confrontational hides inside moments of tenderness. Each canvas operates like a portal into a parallel world: one foot planted in everyday recognizable gestures and settings, the other drifting toward the uncanny and the surreal. There is a deliberate slipperiness to these scenes—they appear narrative, yet resist clear interpretation, as if we are witnessing only fragments of a story whose beginning and end remain just out of reach. By holding the viewer between intimacy and estrangement, familiarity and alienation, Tyfus invites us not to decode, but to inhabit these painted moments, letting their quiet humor, strange beauty, and disquieting undertones work on us over time.

The work of Dennis Tyfus is both deeply personal and universally disarming—forcing us to reconsider the boundaries between creator and viewer, everyday life and the uncanny, seriousness and absurdity. Through his anarchic charm and boundless creative energy, he offers us not just works of art, but an experience - ever-changing, ever-surprising, ever-­alive. Dennis Tyfus is not merely producing art; he is staging a continuous, unpredictable situation in which life itself is the medium.
Dennis Tyfus lives and works in Antwerp. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Middelheim Museum, Antwerp (BE); M HKA, Antwerp (BE); S.M.A.K., Ghent (BE); Bozar, Brussels (BE); CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art of Bordeaux, Bordeaux (FR); São Paulo Art Gallery, São Paulo (BR); Damtschach Castle, Damtschach (AT); Kunstschlager, Reykjavik (IS); and Kunstverein Mannheim and Ludwigshafen, Ludwigshafen am Rhein (DE). His work also features in public collections, such as those of M HKA and the Middelheim Museum, both in Antwerp (BE).