Jennifer Nieuwland - born in Milan 1977 is half Italian, half Dutch. She moved to London, UK in 1995 and still lives and works there today. Jennifer is mostly self-taught and was drawn back to painting full-time only recently. She is an emerging artist who works with a range of media but primarily in oils.
Jennifer has always been interested in human nature, our multi-facetedness, complexity and hidden depths. She has been inspired by the intensity and more maverick works of Alice Neel, Egon Schiele, Willem De kooning and Francis Bacon and their ability to transmit deeper psychological nuance.
Her figurative work is a reflection on time and memory. Her work captures the fragility of childhood and memories, their transience and fluidity yet it also imbues them with an enduring quality.
"Childhood memories create a connection between past and present and are a significant part of shaping who we are today as well as being shaped themselves by time and our fluid state of mind."
She started portraying the memories of old people juxtaposing them to their present selves to create an uncanny, ambiguous image but has now moved on to a more personal narrative, accessing her own memories from childhood. Her process starts from a subconscious and speculative exploration of colour and form, acting and reacting from and within the marks subliminally laid into the paint. This organically conjures up a memory which she then consciously accesses and builds into a narrative, trying to resolve the balance and tension between the abstracted and the representational, the conscious and unconscious. The different moments in the act of painting end up reflecting the different components of a memory, what is vivid, forgotten, ill-defined, ambiguous, imagined or re-imagined. The work often has ambiguous juxtapositions or elements that reflect the way memories overlap; one object, colour, shape or emotion triggering the memory of another.
There is an exploration of childhood memory both from a visual and visceral standpoint. She tries to access her childhood self while also being aware of her own adult response. This results in images that navigate the real and the dream-like, the representational and the abstract, the past and the present.
“I draw on memory, metaphor and fragments of experience to explain a complex inner world, investing the painting with an emotional and psychological charge”
There is always a tension in her paintings between beauty and the innocence of childhood and something darker and more austere. She is particularly focused on moments when the child transitions into the adult world and becomes aware of fear, loneliness, unrequited love, cruelty, betrayal, death. This is balanced with the childhood values of creativity, purity, spontaneity and freedom, creating an ambiguous and magical atmosphere. The child is often painted as if melting, half present half absent, perhaps a metaphor for the dissolution of innocence.
“I try to access the magic and depths of childhood, the way that children respond to the world in a less ordinary, special way yet also portraying the haunting shadow of a looming adult world”
EXHIBITIONS
2019
Affordable Art Fair Hampstead 9th-12th May
Jacksons open painting prize Shortlisted
RA summer exhibition Long listed
2018
The ING Discerning Eye Exhibition Mall Galleries 15th to 25th November
Emerging Women in Art at Burgh House Hampstead
Diverse Portraits : A collective at Burgh House Hampstead
2017
21ST National Open Art Competition at BargeHouse Oxo Tower
Emerging Women in Art at Burgh House Hampstead
Sky Arts heat finalists exhibition at the Wallace Collection
2016
Heatherly's Mid-term show
PRESS
2018 Create! Magazine February/March Issue - selected artist
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