Promised Land, 2026
Studio Grasse
The Promised Land was first the title of Jeroen Cremers’ debut solo exhibition, staged just after art school, as a war in Iran began and the Western world built its justifications from blurred photographs and remote certainties. Shaped by dystopian literature and early science fiction, the work mapped the logics of power, control and systemic collapse: themes that have remained the undertow of his practice ever since.
Returning to the title is not nostalgic but diagnostic. We now live inside the landscape those early works imagined: a world of geopolitical, ecological, technological and psychological imbalance, where extreme wealth has entered the machinery of governance, the climate destabilises, AI advances in the dark and social media manufactures desire and alternative fact.
Faced with this, Cremers chose not to document but to build a place from which to look back at the wreckage with absurdist tenderness, somewhere between elegy and Alice in Wonderland. His sculptures are figures from a private mythology: a rabbit, an owl, an oversized flower, a hand with a raised finger, rockets bound so tightly they buckle. His drawings show wide, indeterminate landscapes strewn with fallen chairs, a chainsaw, a snorkel, oversized Italian shoes and empty bottles, familiar and alien at once: the residue of a civilization that has mislaid itself.
The Promised Land does not offer resolution. It offers a place to wander.