Born in Paramaribo, Suriname to a Surinamese father and Dutch mother, Dineke Blom takes a particular approach to drawing and abstraction in her art. She lives and works in Amsterdam, where she has built a large part of her career and is a professor at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Between 1970 and 1973 she studied fine art at Haarlem’s Ateliers ’63, the first artist-founded fine arts college in the Netherlands, now based in Amsterdam under the name De Ateliers, and later pursued English and American literature at the University of Amsterdam from 1977 to 1983. A connoisseur of the history of art and literature, she is especially interested in 17th century Flemish painting, one of the main sources of inspiration in her work. Though many of her canvases are labelled “untitled”, the word is often accompanied by precisions such as “after Gerard Dou” (2003), “after Hendrick Avercamp” (2005), “after Pieter de Hooch” (2009) or “after Gabriël Metsu” (2014–2015).

In large and medium format, in graphite, charcoal or, since the 2010s, in watercolour, the artist revisits the composition and construction of the key canvases of the “Dutch Golden Age” – the period at which the colonial and cultural power of the Kingdom of the Netherlands reached its height. D. Blom conducts a meticulous analysis of the implied lines that lead the viewer’s gaze in paintings, and the devices deployed by painters to render a genre scene, a seascape, a landscape in oil, investigating these “paintings of the everyday” that Western art history has transformed into the work of “masters”. In Pieter de Hooch’s (1629–1684) celebrated Country Cottage, she scrutinises the composition in order to extract the narrative structure, the distributions of mass and colour that give the eye a direction to follow, a sense of movement and a way of reading. Then, in stripped-down drawings, D. Blom leaves only the sweeps of movement that guide the eye to compose a story: a story whose characters and scenery are transformed into mist, geometric shapes and sketched lines, washed-out colours and eddies of graphite. Re-appropriating and re-composing, the artist conducts a scrupulous examination of painting itself, of its narrative and emotional capacities. Underlying these reflections is the question of the endurance of images and the survival of age-old canons established by the history of art, which persist despite borders and conflicts – such as that of the colonisation of Suriname by the Netherlands – to exert their influence across time.

Since the 1980s, D. Blom’s work has largely circulated in the Netherlands and Europe, and has been the subject of regular solo exhibitions at Adk Actuele Kunst – such as 2019’s If All The Things That Exist Became Smoke. Her works have been shown in group exhibitions devoted to drawing, such as the 2011 show All About Drawing at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, and Into Drawing: hedendaagse Nederlandse tekeningen [Contemporary Dutch Drawings], a touring exhibition from 2004 to 2007 that travelled through Limerick in Ireland, Apeldoorn in the Netherlands, Paris in France, Florence in Italy and Bedburg in Germany. Her work is included in the national public collections of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Frans Hals Museum and the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the ABNAmro and Bouwfonds foundations and the NOG Collection, as well as in private collections.