Iris van Dongen

Van Dongen (1975) currently lives and works in Rotterdam and has a keen sense of what she is looking for in her art. Her interest in drawing began in her childhood home in Brabant. Her father was a collector. Van Dongen began copying the paintings that hung in her home. She developed her style of drawing at a very young age and continued with it ever since. At the age of 21 she graduated at the Academy of Art and Design in Den Bosch.

Iris van Dongen became famous with her sensitive paintings of women that refer to earlier movements in traditional art, such as romanticism. Her work can be seen as self portraits because she projects her state of mind on to her drawings and paintings.

The tension in her fixed images lies in her combination of these melancholic women with signs of contemporary culture. We see a girl that could easily figure in a 19th century Pre-Raphaelite painting were it not for the Manchester United scarf she is wearing. As Van Dongen explains: " I often disagree with how people look at objects. They treat everything as dead. An object is not a dead thing, but can have, just like an expression, a hidden meaning...” Her work suggests a story that often deals with feelings of melancholy.

"I am absolutely not interested in politics and my work is not socially engaged. In that sense, I find myself hopelessly outdated” Van Dongen explains. She prefers to create her own world with music and drawings; a place where she can investigate her own themes of interest such as so called sin and the quest for meaning of life.