Gilles van Sparrentak (48073)
(1958, The Netherlands | Lives and works in Middelburg)

Under the numerical pseudonym 48073, Gilles van Sparrentak transforms remnants of consumer culture (packaging, textiles) and fragments of earlier works into abstract explorations of identity in the algorithmic age.

His sculptural paintings emerge through a process of controlled destruction: objects are cut and sawn apart mid-formation, their fragments reborn and reassembled into organic, autonomous forms that balance on the edge of harmony.

Trained in Architecture (HZ University of Applied Sciences, Vlissingen) and Product Design (Design Academy Eindhoven), he unites structural precision with a destructive method. His practice bridges architectural and design insights with the poetry and rawness of the system's underside, the frayed edges of society and its discarded remains.

He investigates how material and digital systems reduce human experience to abstract data. His works reveal how a numerical world gradually corrodes the fabric of lived experience, leaving scars that testify to both loss and resilience.

As an artist, he consciously embraces a numerical identity: a strategic acceptance of the very system he seeks to subvert. 48073 is not a mask but a mirror, reflecting the oscillation between assigned and chosen identity.
His works capture this in-between space through fragile configurations, where every scar marks both a wound and a healing, and every sawline reveals both rupture and connection.

 

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