Why do the artists do what they do -Lorena Kloosterboer

Natalie Holland
11 min readApr 20, 2018
Tempus ad Requiem XIX, acrylic on panel, 28x28 cm

Lorena Kloosterboer is a Dutch-Argentine realist artist focusing on contemporary still lifes painted in acrylics. She currently lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.

This description is the correct presentation of the artist, yet it doesn’t do any justice to what Lorena is doing.

In today’s art world, it takes a certain courage to focus mainly on a humble subject matter of still life — a genre that is more associated with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Old Masters than with contemporary art.

Since its origins in in sixteenth century Antwerp, the still life as a genre has always been considered as a minor form of artistic expression: merely a depiction of the familiar object, isolated or in a group. Yet because the still life was not associated with a complex meaning of more esteemed genres, such as portraiture or history painting, it offered the perfect means for 20th century avant garde artists to transform into a vital form of contemporary expression.

Then comes her choice of Photorealism, a type of realist painting based on a photographic way of seeing that still provoke debates of whether this popular art genre holds an enduring significance. Yet one cannot ignore what many people admire about the genre which is the skill of the artists to do something we cannot…

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