Biography

My name is Yonah de Beer (Nona Fugazi) and I run INSI art. I have been brought up in a town close to Amsterdam and I am 27 years old. Over the past 4 years I have been working from my studio in Amsterdam Oost. It is from here that I practice my craft on a weekly basis. I have been raised by four homosexual parents, who came from a Jewish and Catholic heritage. Because of my upbringing, I have always felt like I stood outside the normative margins in society. To others I have always had to explain my home situation, and by extent myself. I started painting to express; without prejudice of what is beautiful and what is not, without any sense of good or bad. I started using art as the language to express my individuality. Whether it be abstract portrayals of certain ideas or thoughts or a simple catharsis, my work is motivated by the splintering of my consciousness throughout its perception of reality. Besides painting I also do performance art: Performance on Identity (2019), Performance on Time (2020), and The Artist is Not Present (2020). After my master I started my own studio called INSI art. Under this moniker I have participated in multiple group exhibitions and a solo exhibition: Skek (2021), LAB111 (2022), Kunst voor Ons 1 year anniversary (2022), Amnesty International (2022), A New Story (2022), Chapter 5ive* at het HEM (2022). I also performs at events with live painting: Opening night at Pippi’s (2022), Heineken Afterwork (2022), and Czaar Peter Buurtfeest (2022). I have also worked together with multiple clothing brands: Artistic, La Fam, and Una's Original. In addition to creating art, I also offer training and coaching sessions for companies. In the past I have worked together with Nooit of Nu (Jalien van den Tweel) to teach about the connection between leadership, teamwork, and what painting or creativity has to offer. 

 

My work is philosophy materialized. An example of this is a performance I did in July of 2020. I had the formula for entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, tattooed on my foot. In normal English the second law of thermodynamics can be understood as the arrow of time. While this tattoo was being done I did stand-up philosophy, a form of presenting where I interact with the audience in order to come at a (humoristic) definition for, in this case, time. The reason why I tattooed this formula on my foot is because that is one of the spots on the human body that chaves the fastest and therefore the tattoo would disappear within years, thereby proving the formula. 

 

In addition to seeing art, especially my own art, as philosophy materialized, art to me is also political, because the personal is political. I cannot purch my emotions and my thoughts onto canvas without also reflecting on the ideology that gave shape to my perspective. In the painting series Nostradamus I wanted to reflect on fire. For fire is simultaneously something natural but also something political. In the series I study fires that seem inherently political, such as molotov cocktails or gasoline, but also fires that appear natural, such as the fires raging through the Amazon, Australia, and the Arctic circle. In the current age of massextentinction, capitalism and globalization, nothing seems to remain unconnected with the whole. My art tries to reflect on the interconnectedness of all things. 

 

Finally, my art is there to drown in. To drown in the thoughts that arise; which leads to interpretation. To drown in the feelings that occur; which leads to understanding the sentiment. To drown in the individual symbolism that it presents; which leads to understanding that you don’t understand. My aim in creating art is to reflect the world in such a way on the canvas that it may add moral and aesthetic value to the world.