Biography
Koningen was born to a Norwegian mother and Dutch father during the war whilst his father was stationed in Oslo, working with the Dutch underground. Koningen spent his early childhood in Amsterdam where his introduction to art began with visits to see the Dutch masters at the Rijksmuseum. Koningen's parents moved to Australia in the late 1950s where he excelled at swimming. He studied art and industrial design at the Geelong's Gordon Institute of Technology. Koningen has lived in Norway, Netherlands, Australia, Dutch Antibes, France, UK, moving his studio from Noosa Heads, Australia to Brugge Belgium in 2005 until the end of 2016. He has now relocated back to Australia.
Svein's artist Statement 2019 - 'Creating began for me at the age 4 building a boat at my Dutch uncles Riva Boat factory in Amsterdam. My first gallery visit was age 3, visiting Rembrandt’s Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum… a rather daunting painting for a small child.
Studying art and industrial design I quickly found abstract painting was a passion that continues today.
A blank canvas becomes a story… the paint, the brush with the subconscious flow , all coming together creating on good days a vibrant abstract story on canvas.
Exploring the relationship between colour combinations and texture, working intuitively using large palette knives then paring and scraping back paint revealing glimpses and stories within the larger abstract story. Heavy texture is the focus of the 2017 Paradisaea Series of seven paintings. The series is primarily abstract with the title being the name of the Birds of Paradise, from Papua New Guinea. The series title came after the completion of the works and seeing the colourful abstract birds in flight.
I can work on colour and texture in a series but I seem to always go back to the Black White, maybe it is my retreat place from colour. Black White painting has been a constant in my studio Work with the latest being inspired by the Belted Galloway cow in a lonely wintery paddock in southern Netherlands, near Cad Zand. The paintings in this small series have texture surfaces and then the black has been polished to give the appearance of leather.
Change is a constant in my work and my life with movement the place to live giving new experiences which of course comes alive on the canvas in the studio. Moving my studio from Noosa Heads Australia to Bruges, Belgium and now, back to Australia.
Moving forward with a new studio is once again the challenge with a blank canvas.'
Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the Western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris.
Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades, she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field. Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by Greenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock's paintings. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Christiaan Karel Appel was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement CoBrA in 1948. He was also an avid sculptor and has had works featured in MoMA and other museums worldwide.
Carel Pietersz. Fabritius was a Dutch painter. He was a pupil of Rembrandt and worked in his studio in Amsterdam. Fabritius, who was a member of the Delft School, developed his own artistic style and experimented with perspective and lighting. Among his works are A View of Delft, The Goldfinch (1654), and The Sentry (1654).
Monochromatic painting has played a significant role in modern and contemporary Western visual art, originating with the early 20th-century European avant-gardes. Artists have explored the non-representational potential of a single color, investigating shifts in value, diversity of texture, and formal nuances as a means of emotional expression, visual investigation into the inherent properties of painting, as well as a starting point for conceptual works. Ranging from geometric abstraction in a variety of mediums to non-representational gestural painting, monochromatic works continue to be an important influence in contemporary art.
Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, also known as The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, but commonly referred to as The Night Watch, is a 1642 painting by Rembrandt van Rijn. It is in the collection of the Amsterdam Museum but is prominently displayed in the Rijksmuseum as the best-known painting in its collection. The Night Watch is one of the most famous Dutch Golden Age paintings.
Nicolaes Maes was a Dutch painter known for his genre scenes, portraits, religious compositions and the occasional still life. A pupil of Rembrandt in Amsterdam, he returned to work in his native city of Dordrecht for 20 years. In the latter part of his career he returned to Amsterdam where he became the leading portrait painter of his time. Maes contributed to the development of genre painting in the Netherlands and was the most prominent portrait painter working in Amsterdam in the final three decades of the 17th century.
Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."
The Hague School is a group of artists who lived and worked in The Hague between 1860 and 1890. Their work was heavily influenced by the realist painters of the French Barbizon school. The painters of the Hague school generally made use of relatively somber colors, which is why the Hague School is sometimes called the Gray School.
The Little Street is a painting by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, executed c. 1657-1658. It is exhibited at the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam, and signed, below the window in the lower left-hand corner, "I V MEER".
The Milkmaid, sometimes called The Kitchen Maid, is an oil-on-canvas painting of a "milkmaid", in fact, a domestic kitchen maid, by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. It is now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, which regards it as "unquestionably one of the museum's finest attractions".
Isaac Lazarus Israëls was a Dutch painter associated with the Amsterdam Impressionism movement.
Bramvan Velde was a Dutch painter known for an intensely colored and geometric semi-representational painting style related to Tachisme, and Lyrical Abstraction. He is often seen as member of the School of Paris but his work resides somewhere between expressionism and surrealism, and evolved in the 1960s into an expressive abstract art. His paintings from the 1950s are similar to the contemporary work of Matisse, Picasso and the abstract expressionist Adolph Gottlieb. He was championed by a number of French-speaking writers, including Samuel Beckett and the poet André du Bouchet.
Albert Carel Willink was a Dutch painter who called his style of Magic realism "imaginary realism".
Pieter Jansz. Pourbus was a Flemish Renaissance painter, draftsman, engineer and cartographer who was active in Bruges during the 16th century. He is known primarily for his religious and portrait paintings.
Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch, also known as Hendrik Johannes Weissenbruch was a Dutch painter of the Hague School. He is noted especially for his watercolours.
Andreas Schelfhout (1787–1870) was a Dutch painter, etcher and lithographer, known for his landscape paintings.
Wijnand Jan Josephus Nuijen was a Dutch painter and printmaker who specialised in landscapes, and was greatly influenced by the French Romantics.
A Young Woman Seated at the Virginals is a painting today attributed to Johannes Vermeer, though this was for a long time widely questioned. A series of technical examinations from 1993 onwards confirm the attribution. It is thought to date from c.1670 and is now in part of the Leiden Collection in New York. It should not be confused with Young Woman Seated at a Virginal in the National Gallery, London, also by Vermeer.
Suzanne Perlman was a Hungarian-Dutch visual artist known for her expressionist portraits and landscape paintings. Her bold use of colour has its origins in her early paintings of the tropical island of Curaçao, where she moved with her husband in 1940 to escape Nazi persecution. Her expressionist style developed under the tutelage of Austrian master Oskar Kokoschka in the late 1950s, with whom she worked in Salzburg in the 1960s. Reviewing a 1993 Exhibition as his Critic’s Choice in The Times, John Russell Taylor, art critic and author, wrote that "(Perlman) captures the particular feel of the place while abating none of her expressionist dash".
Grape Harvest
Murano
Luminous
Day at the races
