Lisette van Hoogenhuyze

Lisette van Hoogenhuyze (b. 1991) was born in The Hague. She first took a degree in art history at the University of Amsterdam, and shortly before starting a master's realised that what she actually wanted was to make the work rather than write about it. She enrolled at the art academy of the University of the Arts Utrecht instead, graduating in fine art in 2019, and has described that switch as the point at which everything fell into place. She lives and works in The Hague.

Her paintings and installations are built from layers, patterns and colour arrangements borrowed from the visual motifs of leisure culture, most persistently a day at the beach. The beach interests her as a place of fantasy, halfway between water and land: somewhere people go to slow down, to zoom out, to daydream, to sweat, and to enjoy the moment somewhat compulsively. It also has a remarkably uniform visual language. Parasols, beach chairs, swimwear, striped cool boxes: everything is bright and cheerful, and everyone has agreed to it.

That agreement is what she is really examining. Behind the friendly imagery of beach towels and cool boxes lie questions about keeping up appearances, identity and stereotyping. On the beach we shed our everyday identity and stand there in swimwear with nothing left to hide behind, and it is precisely in that uniform cheerfulness that Van Hoogenhuyze goes looking for tragedy, small ones, observed in how people actually behave, then enlarged in the work. The motifs are chosen to trigger recognition: she wants the viewer's own memories, associations, even smells and sounds, to supply part of the story.

The work refuses to stay politely inside its frame. Canvases are cut out and torn, left to dangle, sometimes hanging as casually as a wet beach towel drying on the balcony of a surf hotel, a deliberate testing of painting's conventional rules, pursued both literally and figuratively. Alongside painting she works with textile and ceramics, drawn to artisanal history and to the sheer abundance of everyday relics, and has increasingly incorporated text.

Travel feeds the practice. Moving between cultures, she is struck less by their differences than by how much of their visual language they share, and then, more interestingly still, by where subcultures diverge inside that apparent universality. Those are borders that exist in order to be crossed.

Queen of the White Elephants (2023) gives a good measure of the work: a beach parasol three metres across and three metres high, combining embroidery with oil paint, which drew crowds at Springboard Art Fair on the strength of its colour and tactility alone. Only afterwards does the scene register, the flames, and a figure who is either diving gracefully or falling out of the sky. Something is not quite right, in among all those associations with a relaxed day by the sea.

Her work has been shown at Unfair and PAM in Amsterdam, This Art Fair, Springboard Art Fair, Art on Paper, Gallery Fanny Freytag and Rademakers Gallery, and at Landgoed de Horst.

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