Anne van Borselen

Anne van Borselen was born in Surabaya in 1937 and brings a rare physical dynamism to her work; the vitality is visible in every canvas. She moves between painting, bronze and ceramic, shifting material to match the emotion at hand.

Painting runs in the family on both sides. Her Indonesian mother painted too, and would wake her in the middle of the night to prepare canvases together and talk about art.

Her paintings carry a poetic commentary caught from lived moments, with stillness and introspection set against the movement. Abstraction is a consequence rather than an intention. She has to work fast, she says: a line has to be drawn quickly, because the scenes she wants to catch are themselves fleeting. She divides her life between Amsterdam and Bali, six months in each, and the trail she leaves behind stays balanced between the figurative and the abstract, with a figure or an animal surfacing throughout.

Anne van Borselen paints because she paints; that has always been true. She comes from painters on both sides and has still found her own way — impulsive, direct, unfiltered.

Within GROUND she stands for the conviction that a voice of one's own is not created but found, and that a lifetime of persistence is the strongest proof that the voice is there.