Jolanda van Gennip
Mondriaan baby
1993
oil and make-up on canvas
70 x 63 cm
In 1993, I painted ‘Mondriaan baby’. An ode to Piet Mondriaan. The fondness/fascination is deep, for his power, his sensitive brushstroke. I look at his works preferably very close to the skin, they touch me deeply and I want to keep looking and disappear into them.
I saw the works of Hilma af Klint for the first time in 2010 in Museum Arnhem and I didn't know what hit me. I had never seen anything like them before. Large abstract works with a spiritual message. Deeply impressed, the work never left me.
Because of their shared interest in the spiritual, these two artists, contemporaries of each other, were brought together in the exhibition ‘Levensvormen’ at Kunstmuseum Den Haag, from October 2023 to February 2024.
- Jolanda van Gennip, 2024
'The feeling of being part of something much bigger than ourselves, whether we call it the universal, the spiritual, nature, the cosmos, or simply reality. Their oeuvres put us in touch with that unknowable whole of which we are undeniably a part.'
- from Life Forms (p. 91), Laura Stamps, curator of modern art, Kunstmuseum Den Haag
Piet Mondriaan
Zee (Pier and Ocean)
1914
charcoal on paper
51 x 63 cm
collection Kunstmuseum Den Haag
All true art comes from universal source. It comes into being intuitively. The very essence of art is the visual expression of -also impossible to describe- life in all its fullness and richness.
- Piet Mondriaan
Hilma af Klint
The Ten Largest no.4 (Adolescence)
1907
tempera on paper on canvas
328 x 240 cm
Those who have the gift of deeper vision can see beyond form and concentrate on the wondrous thing hiding behind every form, which is called life.
- Hilma af Klint
Jolanda van Gennip (NL)
Untitled
2020
oil on canvas
80 x 95 cm
photo Peter Cox
instagram.com/jolandavangennip_painter
After 'Mondriaan baby', now a whole oeuvre further, I went the way of the matter, colour and paint, and always looking to transcend that same matter into something I don't yet know, you could call it spiritualisation, the unknown.
- Jolanda van Gennip, 2024
