Welcome

Maike van der Kooij is fascinated by landscapes, and by the empty in particular.

Her canvases, which mainly depict her home province of Groningen in the northeast of the Netherlands, are to be understood as portraits of a monumental land.

Van der Kooij has an eye for fleeting moments, which she captures in her signature dense use of paint. Creating an accurate rendering of her surroundings is not what matters most. Rather, she looks for the landscape’s essence, its character. Her canvases are layered. Beneath the paint lies a different world: the world of experience of the landscape.

Van der Kooij sometimes creates human portraits as well, which are authentic due to to her style and her unceasing search for the particular.