Quick Facts
Biography
Toos van Holstein (Eindhoven, the Netherlands, 1949) is a Dutch painter with an expressionistic, figurative style.
Biography
Toos van Holstein studied art and art history at the Academy of Arts in the town of Tilburg (the Netherlands). From 1970-1990 she was a teacher in art. In 1983 she had her first exhibition with oil paintings. Several times she has been nominated for the annual election of the Dutch Artist of the Year. She is one of the better known women artists in the country. Toos lives and works in Middelburg, capital town of the province of Zeeland (Sealand), in an old warehouse from the year 1738.
Paintings
Paintings by Toos van Holstein show a recognizable world but do not prescribe what has to be seen by the viewer. Your fantasy can interpret her works in an uninhibited way. Therefore, she prefers to speak of her work as figurative art instead of figural in the literal or obvious sense. Yet and still, each painting is based on an idea, experience or emotion when she is working on it, especially with the knife. Her ideas emanate from her own surroundings and her travels through countries in southern Europe, the Middle and the Far East and North and South America. But she is also inspired by as well medieval writings as the Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) by the Italian Dante Alighieri and the Germanic Edda found on Iceland as the more modern writers like Garcia Márquez and Tolkien. In this creative way Toos van Holstein's art presents a completely unique world according to her saying for me art is travelling the mind.
Exhibitions
On a regular base Toos van Holstein shows her work in galleries in her own country but also in Belgium, France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the USA. She had special shows in
- the museum Het Petershuis (Gennep, the Netherlands) with the motto “Art for living, living for the art”
- the medieval church of Saint Martin in Franeker (the Netherlands) with the motto “Men on its way”, based on the medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven (the Divine Comedy)
- and the museum of the art village of Saint Paul de Vence in France.
The exhibition of “Men on its way” was also shown in the old Dutch Church in the City of London.