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Introducing Brigitte Hendrix
02-10-2025
Brigitte Hendrix is an artist whose work explores the blurred line between mediated reality and personal imagination. Her process begins with collages made from found images and her own photographs, which she then translates into oil paintings. This approach allows her to reflect on the way today’s crises and events flood our perception, at once painfully close yet strangely distant.
Rather than depicting literal grievances, Hendrix captures the surreal, paralyzing sensation that arises from the constant stream of global ills and the casual indifference they are often met with. Her works often carry a symbolic charge, where moments of magic or whimsical surrealism soften harsh realities and open up space for meaning, reflection, and light. By turning fragmented media images into tactile, painted form, she reclaims them from abstraction and gives them new weight.
Brigitte Hendrix studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and continued exploring under the guidance of Arnout Killian. She currently lives and works in Amsterdam.
About What they see V
"While painting the figure of a refugee wrapped in a golden emergency blanket, Hendrix realized the stance echoed that of the fleeing peasant in Goya’s Witches’ Flight. This unexpected connection brought the allegories together: Goya’s vision of superstition, fear, and willful ignorance resonates with today’s migrant crisis. By adding the leg of a witch to her composition, Hendrix draws a line between past and present, exposing how societies continue to look away from suffering, whether under the shadow of tyranny or in the face of displacement and loss."
About What they see IV
"This painting takes inspiration from the posture and aura of Waterhouse’s Cleopatra, reimagined for the present. A queen reclining, absorbed by her phone, as the red glow of a burning world seeps into the scene. The image speaks to the detachment and distraction with which we often meet catastrophe, distant enough to scroll past, yet close enough to illuminate everything."
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