Bas Coenegracht

Exploring the Boundaries of Realism and Abstraction

Bas Coenegracht’s work is a masterful exploration of the human experience, balancing on the line between realism and abstraction, imagination and reality.  

His work is about all of us and awakes our imagination to explore different paths.

Coenegracht about his work:

Making a painting about an experience allows us to hold on to it.

The introspective figures I depict move between realism and abstraction, or between two worlds:

reality and imagination. Setting up the paintings from photographic reference and further developing them from memory opens up narratives that feel both contemporary and timeless.

Transitioning between places or between thoughts and realisations, the inner world of the depicted figures manifests liminality and a search for change. This belief of setting something in motion oscillates between hope and reality, just like painting can be an act of translation from thought or the imagined to the visual and the tactile.

The abstracted and often brightly colored environments propose a sublime experience that reflects the psychological state of the portrayed figures. These paintings, just like one’s memories, are distorted, creating a more textured and layered reading of a both personal and shared reality.

Coenegracht holds a degree in Fine arts from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Fine Arts Department, Amsterdam, NL.

He has an extensive CV of shows and his work is in many public and private collections.