Kim Rijntjes
Kim Rijntjes
About Kim Rijntjes
Kim Rijntjes shows contemporary portraits of women as they are rarely seen: she doesn't hold a face still, she lets it move, almost breathe. She builds a face from threads, charcoal and colour. Threads break and wander across the surface. Her chosen medium is unusual. Where most artists reach for a pencil or brush to set down an outline, Kim reaches for thread.
Through embroidery, both by machine and by hand, she lets the embroidered line do the drawing. Expressionist portraits and minimalist line drawings caught between sensuality, strength and vulnerability, three things usually kept apart, here compressed into a single image. The threads are pulled loose and rearranged, never forced into neatness. And the titles are deliberately left open, because she doesn't want to tell you what to feel.
Everything in her work refuses to sit still: tension, held within a single frame, emotions, expression and line.
Through her embroidered portraits she wants to represent all races, as a symbol of global connection and human unity. A face that remains this open no longer belongs to one person, but to everyone who looks at it.
She works from Atelier-Galerie MIM in Aardenburg, a historic building in the far southwest of Zeeland.
