Throughout her career Elly Strik has been particularly interested in those visionary artists that have probed the limits of human nature, such as James Ensor and Francisco de Goya. The artist has created a body of work based on the existential precariousness of the contemporary subject and on our insertion in a long and complex sequence that links us still to our ancestors; in other words, she explores the boundaries, always blurry, between reality and representation and the performative power still held by mythical thinking and the logic of ritual. Such interest culminated with her first exhibition in Spain at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia “Ghosts, Brides and other Companions” for which she presented a great selection of works including a number of large format drawings on paper. Strik started working with Jean Christophe Ammann in 1987, for the occasion of a two person exhibition at KunstRAI in Amsterdam. Since then, they have been working on a number of exhibitions and publications together, bringing Elly Strik’s work to international recognition.