In my work, I move between control and release, using paint as a way to express what cannot be spoken, only felt.
Born in Naarden, The Netherlands, in 1983, Claire Witteveen is a Dutch abstract painter and photographer who lives and works in Amsterdam. She studied Fine Art Photography at De Fotoacademie in Amsterdam and graduated summa cum laude in 2005. After working internationally as a photographer and designer, Witteveen shifted her focus toward painting in 2020. She is self-taught as a painter and works primarily with oil on canvas and paper. Her photographic education remains present in her sensitivity to framing, light, rhythm and the tension between what is revealed and what is withheld.
Claire Witteveen approaches painting as a language for experiences that resist explanation. Her compositions unfold between control and release, intellect and instinct, structure and disruption. Rather than illustrating a fixed narrative, she builds, removes and reworks layers until a painting begins to hold its own psychological charge. Brushstrokes, erased gestures and changes in density remain visible, giving the surface the feeling of a record: not of a single moment, but of decisions made, reconsidered and allowed to coexist.
The abstract paintings of Claire Witteveen often occupy an in-between state. They move between dream and wakefulness, vulnerability and force, intimacy and confrontation. Witteveen does not ask the viewer to decode a prescribed meaning. Instead, each work functions as an encounter, leaving space for memory, association and emotional recognition. This openness is central to her practice. A painting can be deeply personal in its making while becoming entirely different in the experience of another person.
Recent works by Claire Witteveen place increasing emphasis on atmosphere, material presence and the physical act of painting. Titles frequently act as another layer of the work, carrying fragments of music, language, memory or lived experience without closing down interpretation. Across canvas and paper, Witteveen has developed a visual language that is direct yet unresolved, fierce yet fragile. Her practice is grounded in the belief that painting can hold contradiction without needing to resolve it.
Claire Witteveen has presented her work in Amsterdam and Paris, and with NewHouse Gallery at PAN Amsterdam, Art Rotterdam, KunstRAI, ENTER Copenhagen and CAN Ibiza. NewHouse Gallery represents Claire Witteveen in Amsterdam. Browse available works by Claire Witteveen and explore her exhibition history.