About

Adriaan de Wolf (Groningen, 1986) lives and works in Amsterdam. He likes to paint portraits, people and figures. Within that field he tries to find the vulnerability, and from there also the strength, in what he puts on the canvas. He reasons that if you go back to the core of something, you arrive at a vulnerable point. If you manage to put that on the canvas well, he feels you can show strength or beauty from that vulnerability too. His works therefore often express a stillness, with behind it an emotion that may not always lie on the surface.

He builds his works from a basis of technique, composition, lifelikeness, etc, to arrive at a realistic image. He then develops that further with influences of abstraction, mysticism and blurring, to arrive at a complete image, a story.

Adriaan strongly believes in a saying that has been uttered by many but is perhaps best known through Picasso: ‘learn the rules as a pro so you can break them as an artist’. For him this means that painting is not limited to conventional traditional painting. Every painting is therefore an experiment towards that. The rules have now been learned; time to break them.