1 october 2004 

Presentation Royal Award for Painting

Jury report.

The large self-portraits of Barbara Wijnveld form an ode to the possibilities available in the art of painting. Each visual element in her work has a painterly significance: the drips, the stripes, the colored surfaces, and the lines literally explode into the eye of the beholder. Surfaces collide in daring metaphors. Expressive colors form suggestive relationships, and lines are draped across the canvass to form a membrane, a transparent skin that somehow transports the very image. The way Wijnveld performs her art is not unlike the way a musician plays her instrument: The ‘sounds’ she produces are not aimed at a psychological interpretation of the portrait, but instead constitute a song of praise to the power of the medium itself.