Upstream Gallery feature

Upstream Gallery was founded in Amsterdam in 2003 by Nieck de Bruijn, in a small seventeenth-century building near Central Station. More than twenty years later, the gallery is located in a monumental canal house on Kloveniersburgwal and has become one of the most consistent voices in the Netherlands for radical, engaged, conceptual, and digital art. Its programme moves between painting, sculpture, installation, software, websites, NFTs, browser plug-ins, and other forms that test what an artwork can be when technology becomes part of culture’s basic infrastructure.

What sets Upstream Gallery apart is its lack of anxiety around that breadth. The gallery did not begin as a digital-art gallery and it does not present digital art as a separate category to be explained away. Instead, the gallery's history shows a gradual sharpening of attention: from young, internationally oriented artists working across media, to a programme in which internet art, software, blockchain, and AI sit inside a longer art-historical conversation about materiality, distribution, authorship, and access.

Our editor Nina Knaack spoke with founder and owner Nieck de Bruijn and gallery manager Anne de Jong about the start of the gallery, the rise of the international art fair circuit, the artists who shaped its early identity, the moment digital art entered the gallery, and what’s currently on the agenda.

The beginning

Having studied business and coming from an entrepreneurial family, Nieck de Bruijn had plans to start a company in tailor-made shirts after graduating. In the meantime, he needed a job to pay the rent and develop his business plan. He applied for a position at a gallery in The Hague for two-three days a week and thought that would be a nice solution for some steady income. “I didn’t know much about art actually. Back then I visited museums once in a while but often didn’t understand what I was looking at. I thought this job could be a win-win for me: learning something new while being able to cover my bills.”

The gallery in The Hague was a private foundation and also had another building in the back, designated for their residency program. Artists from abroad would stay there for several months; work, live, and then exhibit in the gallery. For De Bruijn, it was the first time he encountered artists practicing at such close range and a whole world opened up for him. “I loved getting to understand the way artists think, which is often quite different and therefore interesting. Being able to speak with them directly was exciting and I was incredibly fascinated with what they were making and why they did things a certain way.”

Spending a lot of (extra) time at the gallery, De Bruijn was asked to work with them full-time and soon after he also started to buy art himself. What began as an interest quickly became serious collecting. While friends spent money on holidays or cars, he bought artworks. To pay for it, he moved into corporate marketing jobs, though the idea of opening a gallery of his own had already settled in his mind. “Honestly, from a business economics point of view, starting a gallery is a kind of suicide,” he says while laughing. “So it took me some years before I actually dared to do it.”

When the decision finally came, things moved quickly. He had been making lists before: artists he admired, artists he wanted to approach, artists who could form the beginning of a programme. In late 2003, he found a small seventeenth-century space near the Kromme Waal and began calling artists. The first programme came together through a kind of chain of trust: if one artist joined, another would consider it. Marc Bijl and Folkert de Jong were important from the beginning, and Jen Liu, an American artist then connected to De Ateliers in Amsterdam, became another long-term presence. Today, Upstream still works with Marc Bijl and Jen Liu.

Into the international circuit

From the beginning, De Bruijn wanted Upstream to be an international gallery, while at the time many Dutch galleries remained locally oriented. He was interested in a programme that could connect Dutch artists to a wider field, while also bringing artists from abroad into the gallery in Amsterdam.

That ambition coincided with a fast-changing art market. Upstream opened in autumn 2003 and in February 2004 the gallery participated in Art Rotterdam. Just a few months later, De Bruijn was already at Liste in Basel. “In the business plan I had written, Liste was somewhere in year three,” he says. “But after two or three months, Peter Bläuer, the director of Liste at the time, called and said he had heard about my gallery and asked if I wanted to apply.”

At Liste that year, Upstream presented large polystyrene sculptures by Folkert de Jong. While many galleries arrived with ‘suitcase presentations’ to save on transport, De Bruijn borrowed a small truck from a client and drove to Basel with his father. “The booth immediately stood out because Folkert’s work is bold and intense,” he says. “Those colours, the scale, and the slightly pop-art feeling it gives you, it all went down very well with American collectors. So I was incredibly lucky that I already got into that international circuit the first year.”

Also, at that moment in time the art fair system was more concentrated still. In Basel, curators, collectors, galleries, and artists gathered from around the world, and Liste was the place where young art could be discovered. Upstream entered that field at exactly the right time. “For a number of years, there really was this travelling circus,” De Bruijn says. “It was when NADA Miami launched as a younger, more accessible alternative around Art Basel Miami (2003) and when Frieze London had its first edition (2003). Everyone who did something serious in the contemporary art world knew each other and kept encountering everywhere in the world through these fairs.”

The gallery went on to participate in fairs in Berlin, Dubai, and many more places. “It was a demanding pace, but it did give Upstream Gallery its early shape: ambitious and outward-facing, alert to artists whose work was new and exciting.”

A move toward the digital

Upstream’s move toward more digital art began through a collector, somewhat 13 years ago. Hugo Brown, a supporter of the gallery’s programme, kept telling De Bruijn to look at Rafaël Rozendaal. “He would show one of Rozendaal’s websites on his phone,” De Bruijn says. “I thought it was interesting, but I didn’t really understand it yet.”

Through an exhibition on ‘light’ as a subject, a natural cross-over came into being. Since a website also emits light, De Bruijn realized it could enter the subject naturally. He got in touch with Rozendaal and it turned out the artist was developing lenticular prints at the time. “Those prints became a bridge,” De Bruijn says. “They were immediately appealing and referred to something more familiar to me, namely physical works. They had something painterly, but they were also very close to the digital world. When you move around them, something happens. They are basically something like screens, but with limited possibilities.”

Through the lenticular works, De Bruijn also began to understand the logic and the beauty of the websites more clearly. And there was Rozendaal’s online audience revealing something new about artistic circulation, having a close online community following all his projects and instantly backing or collecting from it.

Moreover, Rozendaal’s websites showed a new model of ownership. The artist sold them through contracts that made each website unique, with the buyer receiving the domain name. The work could be resold under the same conditions, with one important rule: the work had to remain publicly accessible on the World Wide Web. “One person owns it, but everyone in the world with internet access can see it,” De Bruijn says. “I found that concept incredibly interesting, and it matched my initial intent of being an international gallery.”

Digital art as conceptual freedom

What De Bruijn recognized in digital art was not novelty alone. He saw a form of thinking that connected back to conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s. “We had already been working with conceptual artists for a while and I saw a similar freedom of thought and a similar radicality in digital art,” he says. And that attracted him.

That recognition also had a geographical dimension. “The Netherlands has played a significant role in the development of conceptual art, with artists operating at a strong international level during those decades,” he explains. “I began to notice a comparable position within digital art. No one in our own country really focused on it at that time, but if you looked closely, Dutch digital artists were already well regarded internationally within that field. It was a small community, but they were operating at a very high level.”

From there, Upstream began working with Rafaël Rozendaal officially, followed by artists such as Harm van den Dorpel, Jan Robert Leegte, and the artist duo JODI. Within a few years, the gallery had brought together several of the most influential Dutch artists working with internet and digital practices.

Growing into the gallery

Anne de Jong entered Upstream Gallery in 2015, first as an intern while studying art history at the University of Amsterdam. During her internship, Upstream found its current location on Kloveniersburgwal, and De Jong stayed on as a gallery assistant alongside her studies.

“I knew very little about contemporary art in general, and about the way the art market works,” she says. “During your art history studies, they don’t really teach you that. But working with a gallery, you suddenly find yourself right in the middle of it all. You work with artists one-on-one, you install things yourself, you talk about the works, and you sell things. It was quite a new world for me, but I immediately liked being so closely involved.”

Like De Bruijn, De Jong became interested in digital art through the gallery. During her art-history studies, internet art had barely appeared. “Video art was as far as it got,” she says. “Websites as art, I had never heard anything about this, but I was fascinated by that other way of thinking about online artworks.”

During her master’s in contemporary art, De Jong then decided to specialize in digital art, did an internship at LIMA, and wrote her thesis on the development of digital and internet art in the Netherlands, being one of the first students at her faculty writing about software and internet art. After graduating, she continued at Upstream and gradually took on more responsibility. During the pandemic period, when the gallery’s co-owner left, her role expanded again. She has since curated exhibitions and has become deeply involved in the gallery’s programme. “I really grew along with the gallery,” she says. “Eleven years later, I am still here.”

Programme

Upstream’s exhibition rhythm is partly shaped by the artists it represents. Solo exhibitions generally return every few years, though the pace differs from artist to artist. Some produce quickly; others, such as David Haines, make precise pencil drawings and oil paintings that require much more time.

Alongside those solos, the gallery organizes group exhibitions, often combining artists from the programme with artists from outside it. Those exhibitions allow the team to test ideas and invite new artists for a short collaboration that might turn into a longer one. “Sadly we cannot represent the whole world,” De Bruijn says. “But through a group exhibition, we can work with multiple artists we find interesting.”

This way of working keeps the gallery from becoming too fixed. The programme has recognizable interests, but it is still built through encounter and curiosity. The most recent group show ‘CONTENT MACHINES – Jouissance’ ran from March to May and was curated by Constant Dullaart, making Upstream’s continuous curiosity visible. The show examined automated production, algorithmic feeds, AI-generated content, and the machinery of online culture, and included work by Sam Lavigne, Tega Brain, Dirk Paesmans, Eva and Franco Mattes, Silvia Dal Dosso, Jonas Lund, Minang Cho, and Constant Dullaart.

“The show is about AI brain rot, the mass production of content that is currently flooding us, and whether valuable work can be found within that,” De Jong says. Dullaart had been working with the subject through his own practice and his online platform, Distant Gallery, and was curious to do a physical show on the subject.

It is a radical exhibition, and the gallery knows such projects are not always easy to sell. “We know in advance that there is a high chance it will not be a major commercial success,” De Bruijn says. “But that is also how we run the gallery. It is a kind of big playground for ourselves. We do what we truly find interesting, and then we look for ways to make it fit financially.”

They are also very much aware of the practical difficulty of selling artworks like this. Digital and software-based works often require new answers for each piece, like a browser plug-in, a wallpaper, a piece of software, a downloadable tool. Each demands a different model of presentation and how to transfer ownership. “We have to think ten steps ahead before we have an answer to these questions,” De Jong says. “But that is also what makes it fun.”

So for Upstream, ‘digital difficulty’ is part of the appeal. Their programme has always required more than placing a work on a wall, asking the team and the collectors to become involved in contracts, access, software, hardware, display, maintenance, and explanation. “This way, we keep on learning new things ourselves every time, never having the same, repetitive system of installing an exhibition. It makes our work incredibly exciting, and also rewarding when you figure something out,” De Jong says.

NFTs after the boom

For Upstream, the NFT boom of 2021 did not fundamentally alter the gallery’s position towards it or towards its collectors, but actually accelerated a conversation the gallery had already been having for years. “I still find NFTs interesting, nothing changed there. Sadly they have acquired a bad reputation mostly because of that enormous, unsustainable hype, but I simply see NFTs as a medium.”

For him, a blockchain offers a logical way to make certain digital works unique, especially when the work itself fits that structure. For other works, it may not be necessary. All in all, the medium has to make sense in relation to the artwork.

“I believe NFTs and blockchains will remain and continue to develop,” De Bruijn says. “It is quite logical in a society that is becoming increasingly digital. At a certain point, paper contracts will be replaced by NFTs, being very functional for selling or trading digital art.”

Furthermore, De Jong stresses that strong blockchain-based artworks do exist, especially when they work with the technology itself. “There are works that can only exist on the blockchain because they use that technology or are reflecting on it,” she says. “It is too easy to say: NFTs are bad, as though all NFTs are the same.”

For her, the comparison with painting is simple. “Ninety-five percent of painting in the world is also pretty bad,” she says. De Bruijn adds: “There are a lot of amateurish paintings being made. Only a small part has become truly interesting for the art world and for art history. With NFTs, or better to say net-based/blockchain art, it is no different.”

Medium and judgement

That position says a lot about Upstream’s larger attitude. The gallery does not treat digital art as a field that needs special pleading, nor does it accept technology as an automatic sign of relevance. A website, an NFT, a software work, or an AI-generated image still has to carry artistic force. The medium changes the conditions of the work, but it does not excuse the work from judgement.

This is where Upstream’s digital programme feels embedded in art history. The gallery’s artists often ask what happens when familiar artistic questions move into technological systems. What is material when the work exists as code? What is ownership when access remains public? What is an edition when a work can change over time? What is authorship when the system generates, responds, feeds back, and evolves?

These questions are contemporary, but they do not arrive from nowhere. They belong to longer histories of conceptual art, systems art, mail art, performance, video, and institutional critique. Upstream’s programme becomes interesting because it allows those histories to meet the present without flattening either side.

Now and hereafter

After more than two decades, Upstream remains defined by an appetite for works that are difficult to place. That difficulty has been there from the beginning: in the early commitment to young and rebellious artists, in the immediate push toward international fairs, in the decision to take digital art seriously before the market knew what to do with it, and in exhibitions like ‘CONTENT MACHINES’, where the commercial path is somewhat uncertain but the artistic questions are relevant.

The gallery’s strength lies in its willingness to work through logistical problems, market hesitation, and technical complexity when the work demands it. Its programme suggests that contemporary art is not threatened but sharpened by new technologies when artists use them to (re)think and experiment.

For De Bruijn and De Jong, that remains the point. A gallery is not only a place where works are shown and sold. It is also a place where forms of attention are developed over time. Upstream has built its identity around that kind of attention: to artists, to systems, to the strange objects that do not yet have a stable category, and to the moments when not understanding something becomes the beginning of looking more closely.