Joline Kwakkenbos

Joline Kwakkenbos’s work delves into the shifting contours of identity, memory, and self-representation, offering intimate windows into her inner world where boundaries of time, history, and gender blur. Drawing from the rich heritage of Dutch painting while transgressing its classical forms, she playfully engages with art history and symbolism to examine conventions of the female nude and reconsider the power dynamics of the gaze.

Continuing the tradition of self-portraiture as a vehicle for examining societal roles and inner experience, Kwakkenbos follows in the lineage of artists like Schiele, who confronted bourgeois Viennese constraints at the turn of the century. Yet her approach differs significantly. Working with vivid chromatic choices and and a loose confident mark-making, she creates self-portraits that interrogate the multiple facets of her identity—her queerness, womanhood, and artistic practice.

Rather than simply controlling her own representation, Kwakkenbos dismantles the conventional notion of self-portraiture as a static moment frozen in time. She transforms it into what she calls “a legacy of her own existence”—a dynamic space for exploring potential selves through the interplay of color, costume, identity, and historical precedent. Her work stands as a bold reclamation—a queer artist’s introspective and unapologetic challenge to patriarchal representations of femininity and self.

Born in the Netherlands, lives and works in Margate, UK. Recent solo exhibitions include: All Fours, Homecoming Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2024; Shapeshifters, Tracy Emin TKE Studios, Margate, UK, 2024; We Do Not Sleep, curated by Tracy Emin, Margate, 2023.