Ineke van der Wal

Ineke van der Wal was born in the Netherlands and lives in Dorset. She began painting in 1977. Katy Macleod describes her art as providing ‘a conceptual space for the body, beneath and beyond the painted surface, taking off from the canvas, burrowing into the recesses of viewers’ minds given over to surface, to notions of identity and to conventional linguistic analysis.’

Captivated by the collision between the physical and the conceptual, van der Wal says that her paintings are ‘about’ relationships ‒ between self and other, the concrete and the abstract, the linguistic and the visual, to name a few. She derives inspiration from literary texts, poetry, and the cultural heritage she studied as an art historian.

Describing her work, van der Wal says: ‘The work – as always – is not a straightforward translation or representation of the real, it is as to how I imagine it to be. […] captur[ing] a collision between meaning and content, abstracted and figurative.[…] a vantage point to view the world in an internal landscape.’ (Ineke Van der Wal, 2014)