Published by Penguin Random House, Roddy Doyle’s latest novel ’The Women Behind The Door’ features Barbara Hoogeweegen’s 2018 painting ‘Perhaps’ on the US and Canadian front cover jacket design. Out September 12th, 2024.

Published by Penguin Random House, Coco Mellor’s latest novel ‘Blue Sisters’ features four paintings from Barbara Hoogeweegen’s ‘Incandescent’ series on the US front cover jacket design. Out September 3rd, 2024.

“Voce et intellecto.” These were the qualities the poet Dante admired in art and when I look at Barbara Hoogeweegen’s portraits of women, voce et intelletco are what comes to mind.

Read the full post on The Blue Lantern arts blog.

Published by Penguin Random House, Diane Johnson’s latest novel ‘Loran Mott Comes Home’ features Barbara Hoogeweegen’s 2017 painting ‘Jeepers Creepers Where’d You Get Them Eyes’ as the front cover jacket design.

Barbara Hoogeweegen has contributed seven portraits to the ‘Portraits for NHS Heroes’ initiative. ‘Portraits for NHS Heroes’ emerged out of an online Instagram initiative started by artist Tom Croft during the COVID-19 crisis of 2020, whereby painters have been commissioned by NHS workers to paint their portraits for free, as a thank you for the incredible work they are doing on the frontline of this epidemic.

Read the full article in The Economist.

Barbara Hoogeweegen has been shortlisted in the Discerning Eye Awards with the painting ‘Long Ago’ from the ‘Incandescent’ series to show in the Mall Galleries from 14th November until 24th November, 2019.

The Mall Galleries, The Mall, London SW1

Barbara Hoogeweegen has been shortlisted in the Wells Art Contemporary Awards with the painting ‘Long Ago’  from the ‘Incandescent’ series, to show in Wells Cathedral from 20th July until 11th August 2019. Winners will be announced 8th August.

The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery on Conway Street will be hosting award-winning poet Edward Barker for an evening of poetry-reading through the ages on Thursday 24 May 2017, 6.00 – 7.30 pm. Starting with Horace’s view of the orchard, Barker will be drawing from a body of garden poetry across the ages.

The reading will be held amidst the work of two portrait artists: Dutch artist Barbara Hoogeweegen and Madrid-based María Torroba.

Hoogeweegen’s mark-making is gestural and painterly, her colour palette subjective. She works from her own photographs, film stills and found images, engaging in the slippage between the felt and the photographic and highlighting again the contrast between the performance of a particular moment and its reality.

Drawing on the traditions of portraiture from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, Torroba’s works incorporate Spanish and Belgian linens, antique lace embroidered by her grandmother, ribbons, hessian and even shells collected on her travels, as well as found papers which reference both the motifs of the Renaissance age and hint at contemporary media.

In this particular body of work, Gorgeous, both artists explore the theme of portraiture in contrast with floral motifs, textures and colours.

View the full article on the Chelsea Fringe website

The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery is hosting award-winning poet Edward Barker for a poetry-reading evening on the theme of gardens. He’ll be surrounded by the work of two portrait artists: Dutch artist Barbara Hoogeweegen and Madrid-based María Torroba. Both will explore the theme of portraiture in contrast with floral motifs, textures and colours. 24 May, 6pm-7.30pm. Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, 2a Conway Street, London W1T 6BA.

Barbara Hoogeweegen has been shortlisted in the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize 2018 with the paintings: ‘Eye Am’ and ’Trust in Me’ from the ‘Incandescent’ series.

Once again the Rebecca Hossack gallery presents another stunning exhibition, this one appropriately titled, “Gorgeous”, featuring works by Barbara Hoogeweegen and Mara Torroba. Gorgeous features portraits of women by both artists, who each have their own unique and equally stunning techniques in which they choose to create their interpretations of beauty.

Once again the Rebecca Hossack gallery presents another stunning exhibition, this one appropriately titled, “Gorgeous”, featuring works by Barbara Hoogeweegen and Mara Torroba. Gorgeous features portraits of women by both artists, who each have their own unique and equally stunning techniques in which they choose to create their interpretations of beauty.

“Gorgeous” refers to the physical attractiveness of something – how beautiful it is. Beauty is a characteristic of an idea, animal, object, person or place that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure or satisfaction. Although beauty is perceptual and open to opinion, viewers will find it extremely hard to deny that both artists’ works on display are anything less than beautiful.

Madrid-born artist Maria Torroba focuses on using the Renaissance for inspiration. Renaissance art marks a cultural rebirth at the end of the Middle ages and the rise of the Modern world. One of the distinguishing features of Renaissance art is its highly realistic linear perspective. The development of perspective was part of a wider trend towards realism. Painters then developed other techniques, studying light and shadow, and famously in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, human anatomy. Torroba uses da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ in her works seen here, thus creating giant collages of women, using the Vitruvian Man as their faces. Torroba uses Spanish and Belgian linens and antique lace embroiled by her grandmother in her collages, along with shells she collects on her travels.  “Frida Tudor” is instantly eye catching as the stunning red used for Frida Kahlo’s dress and lips blaze across the gallery. “Mariana Dark Pink” shows a classically dressed woman holding what is possibly a bag that has been decorated with magazine cut outs of models, giving this mesmerising piece a classic archaic aesthetic with a modern twist. Torroba’s portraits exude elegance and regality, with their bold, rich colours, and the subjects all holding themselves with perfect posture.

Barbara Hoogeweegen is a Dutch artist living in London, working with oil on canvas. Her works are themed around the female psyche and identity. Viewers will have their breath taken away as they enter the upstairs of the gallery where Hoogeweegen’s work is on display. Her oil-painted portraits are objects of pure beauty. Each subject of the paintings is completely different from the last, showing women of all races, ages and styles, yet the series exudes a vibrant and bewitching sense of unity. Many of the paintings contain floral themes, with the women wearing floral headwear against bright, colourful backgrounds. “Eye of the Storm” immediately catches viewers’ eyes as the model’s striking white hair contrasts beautifully against her dark skin from which piercing blue eyes stare straight into the eyes of the viewers. Each and every woman featured in Hoogeweegen’s paintings is not only beautiful, but strong and powerful in their own way, with each canvas overflowing with the confidence of the women inhabiting them. Hoogeweegen’s paintings are carefully orchestrated, and yet also flow freely across the canvas. The various expressions and many pairs of eyes in this series of works create an incredibly intimate relationship between painting and viewer.

“Gorgeous” truly is, as the name suggests, a simply beautiful collection of works. The exhibition is on at Rebecca Hossack Gallery, Conway Street until the 26th May. More information may be found here.

Read the full Ennigaldi article here

Josephine Pembroke hosts an interview featuring Barbara Hoogeweegen on Radio Gorgeous: ‘Barbara is fascinated with the female face, she researches, photographs and studies her sitter for hours, she goes to her studio and over six to eight hours and paints her subject with vibrancy and passion. Barbara adores oils and layers her paintings with gooey paint. Her mark making is gestural and painterly, her colour palette is unique. GORGEOUS is on at The Rebecca Hossack Gallery from Thursday May 3 until Saturday 26 May 2018’

Click here to read the full article and listen to the podcast

Barbara Hoogeweegen’s Inevitable exhibition  covered in The Sunday Times Style section: “Dreamy picture of work by Barbara Hoogeweegen at the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery.

Barbara Hoogeweegen’s paintings, based on photographs she has taken of her subjects, seem to deal with the unsaid, perhaps the unsayable.

On the surface, they are well executed, small-sized (average dimensions 32 x 26 cm) works of mothers and their mostly teenage children in the idealized urban setting of Notting Hill. Using oil on board and a subdued palette, the artist shows us the immaculate interiors, the well-groomed Tabithas and Justinians, the light pouring in at well-scrubbed windows, the family dog – and yet.

Underlying all this, written in to the calmly worked brush strokes, there is loss, whether by death (mother or child) or parting (grown up child leaving home, parents getting divorced).

Hoogeweegen achieves this by overpainting sections of her child figures so that they appear to fade into the background. It suggests too that the mother figure might already be starting to calibrate the days before her child will be wholly gone.

The paintings depict happiness certainly –- mother and daughter holding hands, heads together on a sofa, everything that parental love, Notting Hill and good schools can bestow. But what are we to make of the school satchel on its own, the abandoned toys, the set of Russian Dolls where the final, smallest one of the four has faded until only the pale outline remains? And what of the mother whose arms hold an almost bleached-out baby who seems to be reaching out through a window to the blue sky beyond?

The hang is awkward, a two-tiered arrangement that makes the top tier difficult to see. Perhaps the unsayable here is also the untouchable, the pain of child loss too great to confront directly.

View the original article on the Crawford Arts Review web site

Local artist Barbara Hoogeweegen (Prideaux) has produced a set of new works which continues her series of shows exploring relationships and disconnection between people. Hoogeweegen’s last show was called Face which she says is: “About how people represent themselves on Facebook and the idea that people are reaching out from a place of isolation to connect with people.” Another show was called ‘Eye Am’, a collection of portraits from from stills to illustrate the range of emotions that exist between people and this latest set of paintings is called Inevitable, about children leaving home. It is partly autobiographical as her own daughter is about to leave home and all the images are of  local mothers with one of their children fading into the background.  Hoogeweegen says: “It’s about time passing, nostalgia and childhood.”  She has used old broken up frames to add to that sense of time and history. They are brilliant. Rebecca Hossack Gallery, 5th-24th May. www.rebeccahossack.com

View the original article on the Notting Hill Post web site

Panels normally used for adverts are being used to display the art. Two lifts at a south London Underground station have been transformed into a public art gallery. Students from the City and Guilds of London Art School have used 20 A1-sized panels inside the lifts, usually used for adverts, to display their work.

The ‘Art Lift’ has been organised by art agency Art Below which comes up with new ways to display art in public spaces in London. The artwork will be on display at Kennington station until 12 September.

Students at the City and Guilds art school are taught the traditions of painting, sculpture and printmaking within a contemporary context.

The public art display coincides with the Cleaver Square-based school’s fine art show next week.

View the story on the BBC web site