About The Artist

Rien was born in Enschede, The Netherlands, in 1923. He studied at the local Academy of Art before WWII, when it existed under another name. Between 1945-49, he travelled through Southeast Asia with his own Netherlands Indonesian Welfare Artists theater and cabaret company. Having returned to The Netherlands, his energy was absorbed in stage-management and in architecturial glass production. It was only in the early 1980s, that he realised full-time painting , when he had first created his own renovating “mosaic” style, which goes one step further than Mondriaan’s work half a century earlier. His meditative way of creating resembles that of De Kooning, who also dared to deviate from the current fashion in abstract painting. And though Picabia was the first modern painter using “transparency”, he did not get rid of lines and contours like Rien does. In 1988 Rien had his first big exhibition at the "Lenten" Art Galery near Deventer, where he showed 50 of his gouaches. In the Dutch Government’s Parliament building “Het Binnenhof” in The Hague, a seven months solo exhibition was organised in 2002/3 especially for 24 of Rien’s paintings, where the Vice Prime Minister and Secretary of the Treasury then in function, Gerrit Zalm, opened the show officially, on september 3, 2002. In 2005 Rien was granted a Career Award at the 5th Biennial of International Contemporary Art, with the Lorenzo Al Magnifico medal of the City of Florence, Italy, when he participated in it with a set of 5 acrylic paintings on canvas "The Serasons". In 2009 he was awarded a Certificate of Excellence (Honorable Award) bij the Artaddiction Galery in London Rien's data and 10 images of his paintings are included in the website of the Overijssel Provincial Intermediary organ in Zwolle "KCO". Rien has had fourteen solo shows and participated in fifteen international exhibits. __________________________ Email address: riri@hetnet.nl Website: www.bkoverijssel.nl