Contact Elle Follow Elle
Elle van Baaren (b. 2000, Netherlands)


Elle is an Amsterdam-based artist working with installation, sculpture, performance and scenography. Rather than making autonomous objects, she constructs situations that people unknowingly enter. Familiar spaces slowly lose their certainty, while props, sculptures and architectural elements begin to perform.

Her installations function as sets in which roles continuously shift. Visitors become performers, witnesses or accomplices without clear instruction, while the distinction between stage, exhibition and everyday reality starts to dissolve. Waiting, participation, control and misdirection are recurring materials within the work.

Recent projects focus on authorship and agency: who determines the script of a situation, who follows it, and whether these positions can change. The Panopticum Show (2023), for example, confronted visitors with a performance that never arrived, leaving expectation itself to become the event.
Alongside her autonomous practice, Elle co-founded STUDIO MAX & ELLE with artist Max Onink. While both maintain independent artistic practices, the initiative extends their way of working by creating space for exhibitions, collaborations and new artistic production initiated from within their own practice rather than waiting for institutional opportunities.

More Elle