Carolien Wissing - Paintings & contemporary art

Carolien Wissing (Aalten, 1976) is a painter of extensive or, on the contrary, intimate landscapes in a sober color palette. She depicts the area where human intervention ends, and nature begins. Bridging the surreal and the earthly in search of a symbiosis between man and nature. Her artworks immerses the viewer in a world that can be divided into feelings of desire, fear, humor and awe. It celebrates our bond with nature, to help us remember where we are rooted.Her work is a Shintoistic approach to invent a more modest role for mankind, to find a closer relationship between ecology and ethics. It will eventually lead you to a sense of place, belonging and wonder.

Purchases Carolien's work has been purchased by housing corporation Lieven de Key, GSUS Sindustries, the Amsterdam Museum, Benetton, NIOD and Rijkswaterstaat, among others, and is part of private collections in the EU and the US. Her work has been shown in Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle and the Amsterdam Museum.

Projects Carolien regularly initiates her own projects, such as Art Raw (2012) when she filled a huge factory hall – the Kromhouthal in Amsterdam – with her work, Art Venture (2015) exhibition on a former deep-sea trawler during Art Rotterdam and The White Ball Spectacle in Amsterdam (2019) where the stories behind her work where revealed by audio fragments.

Background In 2000, Carolien graduated as an architectural designer (Art Academy Constantijn Huygens, Kampen, the Netherlands). After her studies, she regularly traveled and worked abroad for extended periods of time. From North and South America to Asia and Africa but also in Europe, where she built houses in France and the Spanish Pyrenees and trained horses in Iceland. She lived often on the periphery, between nature and culture. Many of her painted landscapes originate from one of these places, where the existence of culture fades and slowly passes over into the rules of nature.

Currently Since 2020, Carolien has returned part-time to her native soil in Aalten, where she is co-founder of an agroforestry project called Nieuwe Bodem. Here she is responsible, among other things, for the propagation of trees. About a year before the start of the project – still unaware that she would be co-owner of many trees a year later – Carolien started painting forests and trees. Nieuwe Bodem (New Soil) has set her off on a journey about the ground beneath her feet. She is trying to get a grip on it while working with it. This ongoing quest resulted in many artworks that can be found here online as well as in upcoming exhibitions and art experiences.