For Dutch painter and sculptor Eveline van de Griend, the friction between the past and present makes for a lot of unsettled power.
That’s the first thing that strikes you about her often uncomfortable images, which feature beautifully painted scenes evoking renaissance imagery with an unflinchingly honest twist of modernity. It’s her strand of work that deals most heavily with the aftermath of post-colonialism—a particular resonance drawn from a peripatetic upbringing in Africa, England and Russia before returning to the Netherlands and finally settling in her current base of Berlin. Twinned with her ongoing Art For Gold project—where she makes portraits of people who donate gold to be melted down into a work to be installed at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town on Freedom Day— they read like a call for social justice..jpeg)
