The Rembrandt House Museum | Coming Soon!

Wendelien Schönfeld - Woodcuts

7 July - 30 September 2012

From 7 July to 30 September the Rembrandt House Museum, which regularly stages exhibitions of contemporary prints, will be presenting a retrospective of Wendelien Schönfeld’s work.

Wendelien Schönfeld (born 1950) is one of the Netherlands’ most interesting contemporary printmakers. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam in 1977, and has since worked as an independent artist. Vibrant colours and contemporary elements are a common feature of her paintings, gouaches, wooden sculptures and coloured woodcuts. Schönfeld has concentrated on the technically extremely complicated medium of coloured woodcuts. Her figurative prints escape the rigidity that woodcuts often display. She draws on the wood with a gouge like a pencil on paper. And she seems to paint with each printing (a separate woodblock is used for every colour in a print). She mixes printings in her mind as a painter mixes paint.

Schönfeld’s work sparkles with light and colour and projects a shimmering tranquillity. It is a landscape in which you can feel the outside air, a lifelike and present portrait, an interior with daylight drawing bars on the walls, brushing past chairs and tables and reflecting in floors. The 2011 woodcut Dijksgracht, an evocation of a sultrysummer’s day in Amsterdam, is a classic example of her approach.

A lavishly illustrated monograph with an introduction by Gijsbert van der Wal, art journalist at NRC Handelsblad, will be published to coincide with the exhibition. The book is published by the Hercules Segers Foundation, in collaboration with Uitgeverij De Weideblik. The Hercules Segers Foundation’s purpose is to promote interest in printmaking and it achieves this aim by publishing books and staging exhibitions.