Marije Bijl is a Dutch artist. A storytelling artist, or so she has been called. Her works tell stories of Western identity and its relations towards power.
The human world is made of tales, tales used to project power, to build identities with, to colour the world, to try to give their lives a sense of place or purpose within their own tales.
The stories and identities that Marije draws and paints are fragmented, hovering between realistic and abstract, as if built up of stories that are haphazard, disconnected, not what they seem.
Different pieces and saturated colours that sometimes only just and sometimes no more fit together, paint and ink that try to build up identities as haphazardly as we construct them, masks that could be truths, symbols that could be philosophies, paint that could be flesh, lines that could be thoughts. Or rifts. Or forgotten distortions.
Marije Bijl currently travels the world following her spouse, and has exhibited in The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, France, China, the USA and Canada.
