Loutje Hoekstra

Loutje Hoekstra (1994) works in Amsterdam and came to art from biology. Her practice runs through painting, performance and illustration, and turns on the human body in its continuous search for belonging. On her canvases, x-ray-like figures find a frame in which to merge with their surroundings and change — becoming part of a landscape, a city, or a couch in a living room, always looking for shelter.

Painting, for Hoekstra, is a performative act that engages the whole body. Through body prints and gesture the body becomes both subject and tool, registering presence, movement, pressure and contact directly onto the surface. The works do not depict the body so much as index it, catching weight, resistance and spatial impact over time. Interruptions and imperfections are left visible, which moves attention away from the surface of the body toward its imprint.

A central question is how space is experienced through the conditions imposed on body and psyche — a site of power and fragility, of connection and isolation at once. She currently brings that into dialogue with grief and the tension between containment and release, through the bodyprints that form the fundament of her paintings.

Within GROUND, Loutje Hoekstra holds the season's most personal layer: the ground of one's own body, one's own history, one's own loss.

Her work is proof that a path of one's own is not always a path chosen — sometimes it is the only path left. That is what makes her presence in this season essential.