Helen Verhoeven '92

ARTIST STATEMENT

Helen Verhoeven (NL, 1974) immigrated from the Netherlands to the United States at the age of 12. She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and the New York Academy of Art, returning to Europe in 2005 to be a resident at the Rijksakademie. She makes paintings which are sometimes accompanied by ceramic work, stained-glass windows, printmaking, film or installation. Her work ranges from very small to monumentally large and from simple and iconic to crowded and chaotic. The human experience is central: both the turmoil of the individual and the hysteria of the group. Verhoeven appropriates and inverts the traditions of state-portraiture, religious and mythological painting, the muse, the nude, the fantastical and the mundane.