Maaike Schoorel (NL 1973) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam) and the Royal College of Art (London). Her paintings have been acquired by museums and collectors worldwide, and have been exhibited at the Frans Hals Museum (Haarlem), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Kunstmuseum Den Haag (The Hague), Martin Gropius Bau Museum (Berlin), Museum Kunstpalast (Dusseldorf), Hayward Gallery (London), Saatchi Gallery (London), Fondazione Memmo (Rome), LA County Museum (Los Angeles), CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art (San Francisco), Museum MDD (Belgium), Sydney Biennale amongst other venues. She recently returned to Amsterdam, having spent many years living in London, New York and Rome.

The triptych, large as it is, it surrounds the viewer and gives the impression one could immerse oneself in the painting.

… but above all she has the ability to paint the transparency of glass or the reflective quality of water.

“Schoorel joins in a painterly game that stretches back at least as far as the seventeenth century. Frans Hals is exemplary of the way that a ruffled collar or sleeve constantly oscillates between the mimetic rendering of a thing in the world and the virtuosic demonstration of its own material identity as paint. But whereas in the work of Hals and his contemporaries, this instability generally plays out only in discrete areas, never threatening the recognizability of the overall composition, in Schoorel’s work the playing field extends across the entirety of the canvas.” — Jacob Proctor