Cathalijn Wouters’s paintings begin with a designer’s eye — and then deliberately loosen their grip
Amsterdam-based artist Cathalijn Wouters has joined the roster of SmithDavidson Gallery, bringing renewed attention to a practice shaped by graphic design, collage, and a long, patient search for pictorial form. In a recent conversation, Wouters traced the path from her 1980 graduation in graphic design at Sint Joost in Breda to the more uncertain territory of painting, which she says became urgent precisely because it did not come easily.
That tension between control and openness still structures her work. Trained by typographer Chris Brand, Wouters learned to think not only about form, but also about the space around it — a sensibility that continues to inform her compositions. Although she had wanted to study painting from the start, she followed graphic design instead, and only later found her way back to the medium that had first drawn her in.
A decisive shift came after she saw “La Grande Parade” (1984–85) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The work of Georg Baselitz, A.R. Penck, and Pablo Picasso clarified what she wanted from painting: a field where gesture, structure, and physical presence could remain visible at once. In her early decades, Wouters moved through several approaches before arriving at a more recognizable body of work, a process she describes as essential to her development.
Her studio method reflects that same openness. Rather than beginning with a fixed idea of the final image, Wouters often starts with drawings and sketches, then works directly on linen, treating it more like paper than a stretched canvas. She has said that removing the easels from her studio gave her greater freedom to cut, arrange, and work more playfully across the surface. The result is a practice in which painting and drawing are not separate categories so much as overlapping languages.
Literature also plays a role. Wouters cites Marcel Proust and Jonathan Franzen as writers who influence her through their layered attention to the human psyche. She is drawn to artists and works that leave a lasting impression before she begins to analyze how they are made, naming Egon Schiele among the figures that have stayed with her, along with modern and postwar painting more broadly.
That openness extends to the present. Wouters said she recently felt a strong connection to Diana Schultz’s work at Art Basel, describing an affinity with Baselitz while noting that Schultz’s language remains distinctly her own. For Wouters, those encounters are not simply references; they are reminders that painting can still shift, surprise, and remain unfinished in the best sense.
