Landscapes of My Chest I | Loutje Hoekstra

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Loutje Hoekstra
Amsterdam, Netherlands, b. 1994

Loutje Hoekstra is an Amsterdam-based artist with a background in biology. Her practice unfolds through painting, performance, and illustration, revolving around the human body in its continuous search for belonging. On her canvases, röntgen-like figures find a frame to merge with their surroundings and transform - whether becoming part of a landscape, a city, or a red couch in a living room, they are always seeking a place of shelter. 

Painting, for Hoekstra, is a performative act that engages the whole body. Through body prints and gesture, the body becomes both subject and tool, registering movement and contact directly onto the surface. The resulting works do not merely depict the body but index its presence, capturing weight, resistance, and spatial impact over time. Interruptions and imperfections are allowed to remain visible, redirecting attention away from the body’s surface toward its imprint.

A central question in her work is how space is experienced through the conditions imposed on the body and psyche. She considers the human body a site of both power and fragility - a space of negotiation and political expression, as well as a biological and social entity. 

Currently, she is bringing these earlier conceptual concerns into dialogue with grief and the tension between containment and release. Hoekstra is particularly interested in this process in relation to the female body, which operates simultaneously as a site of connection and as a threshold subjected to external gaze, regulation, and expectation. Her work investigates how agency is negotiated under these conditions, proposing surrender and the loss of control as strategies through which agency can be reconfigured rather than forfeited.

Hoekstra holds an academic degree in Biology and Innovation Sciences, illustrates regularly for the Dutch Newspapers and has recently exhibited at de Kring, Amsterdam and MADART Foundation Amsterdam.

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