About

Dutch contemporary artist Ellen de Meijer creates figurative portraits of modern-day archetypes that expose the contradictions and fragilities of contemporary life. Her subjects are not portraits of individuals, but constructed embodiments—figures that reflect the collective struggles, illusions, and performative behaviors shaping our time.

De Meijer’s archetypes inhabit states of tension: between authority and vulnerability, control and submission, innocence and complicity. Polished yet emotionally detached, composed yet unsettled, they reveal how social structures, power systems, and inherited conventions condition not only present behavior but the legacies passed on to future generations. The recurring motif of gloves, for example, functions as a symbol of distance and responsibility—hands that appear clean and untouched, while remaining deeply implicated in systems of influence and control.

Her practice engages themes of status and power, material wealth, technology, climate change, competition, and resistance, situating the work within the cultural and political currents of the past decade. By framing portraiture as a site of both projection and concealment, de Meijer makes visible the emotional and ethical costs embedded in consumerism, digital dependency, and global capitalism.

At once restrained and haunting, her paintings invite sustained reflection on what lies beneath the surfaces of modern identity: the uneasy negotiations between authenticity and performance, intimacy and detachment, humanity and spectacle.

Ellen de Meijer (b. 1955, the Netherlands) lives and works in Amsterdam. Her artistic practice is rooted in an early fascination with visual communication, first explored through photography. After working in commercial photography, de Meijer found the medium too restrictive and turned briefly to writing, studying Dutch literature and working as a copywriter. Language, however, proved insufficient for what she sought to express—what she has described as “the world of the seen and the unseen at the same time.”

At the age of 28, de Meijer committed herself fully to painting and began her formal training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tilburg. Drawing on the technical discipline of the Dutch painting tradition while maintaining a strong experimental drive, she developed a distinctive figurative language that merges psychological depth with formal restraint.

Alongside her own practice, de Meijer played a significant role as an educator. For over twenty years, she founded and led an independent art school in Bussum, mentoring hundreds of students while continuing to refine her own work. In 2008, she closed the school to focus exclusively on her painting practice.

Since then, de Meijer’s portraits of contemporary archetypes have gained international recognition for their incisive engagement with power, identity, and social performance. Her work has been exhibited internationally at major art fairs including Art Miami, Art Stage Singapore, and Hong Kong Contemporary, and was selected for NADA Curated by the New Art Dealers Alliance in 2022. Her paintings are held in prominent private collections, including the VanDenBroek Foundation in the Netherlands.

Today, de Meijer’s practice is increasingly oriented toward institutional contexts. Her original paintings are reserved for exhibition and museum collaboration, forming the conceptual foundation for a broader body of work that includes editions and research-driven projects. Through this approach, she continues to position her practice within critical contemporary discourse, contributing a distinctive and mature voice to figurative painting.

2024, 2025

• Miami, fair, Art Miami, Unix Gallery

2022

• New York City, solo show, Lost and Found, Unix Gallery, New York, NY
• Selected for NADA Curated: Reduction to Satire (Reductio Ad Satura), an online exhibition by Fatos Ustek.
• Group exhibition, Cove Street Arts, Portland, Maine, USA

2019

• Aspen, auction, Art Crush
• Hong Kong, fair, Art Central
• New York City, solo show, #CO2, at UNIX Gallery
• New York City, group exhibition, Mad Summer, at UNIX Gallery

2018

• Delray Beach, museum group exhibition, Tech Effect, Cornell Art Museum
• New York City, group exhibition, at UNIX Gallery
• Palm Beach, fair, Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary, UNIX Gallery

2017

• Selected for Artsy Featured Artist selection, August 2017
• Miami, fair - Art Miami, UNIX Gallery
• New York City, group exhibition - Mad Summer, at UNIX Gallery
• New York City, group exhibition - Future Anesthetics, at UNIX Gallery

2016

• Houston, solo show - Dissolution, UNIX Gallery
• New York City, group exhibition - You Can’t Always Get What You Want, UNIX Gallery
• Aspen, fair - Art Aspen, UNIX Gallery
• New York City, fair - Art New York, UNIX Gallery

2015

• New York City, solo show - Digital Divide, at UNIX Gallery
• New York City, group exhibition - Efflorescence, at UNIX Gallery
• New York City, fair - Art Miami, UNIX Gallery
• Singapore, fair - Art Stage Singapore, UNIX Gallery
• San Mateo, fair - Art Silicon Valley, UNIX Gallery
• Houston, fair - Texas Contemporary, UNIX Gallery
• Southampton, fair - Art Hamptons, UNIX Gallery
• New York City, fair - Art New York, UNIX Gallery, New York, NY

2014

• Miami, fair, Art Miami, UNIX Gallery,
• Ontario, fair, Art Toronto, UNIX Gallery
• Southampton, fair, Art Hamptons, UNIX Gallery
• Aspen, fair, Art Aspen, UNIX Gallery

1993 - 2010, select exhibitions

• Group show, Art Works, Amsterdam (the Netherlands)
• Solo show, Gallery Donkersloot, Aalsmeer (the Netherlands)
• Group show, Artes, Bussum (the Netherlands)
• Solo show, PaintBizz, Bussum (the Netherlands)
• Solo show, Gallery de Genieloods, Aalsmeer, (the Netherlands)
• Group exhibition, AIS, Beurs van Berlaghe, Amsterdam, (the Netherlands)