Dutch-New Zealand artist Arie Hellendoorn is interested in using the conventions of portraiture as a structure from which to base abstract representation of the human form. Portraits are initially constructed from found images, confronting the original meaning with a new context. Hellendoorn’s combination of portraiture with abstraction recognises the space between a painted image and an accurate presentation of the world around us. Even his colourful seemingly abstract patterns allude to the micro, elemental forms that make up nature.

This series of work - colourful and playful studies of the human head, candy-coloured watercolour bubbles on a silhouette, were inspired by the controversial German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, inventor of a technique for preserving tissue specimens. Hellendoorn says “These paintings focus on the voyeuristic aspect of examining the inside of a person’s body…The renderings of anatomical structures are playful possibilities of line, colour, form and composition, within the tight boundaries of a portrait.” The process von Hagens developed led to the travelling exhibition of dissected human bodies, titled Body Worlds which went on display in Auckland in 2018.

Arie Hellendoorn was born in 1980 in the Netherlands and immigrated to New Zealand in 1986. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) from Massey University, Wellington in 2007. He has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions throughout New Zealand since 2003, and had his first Australian solo exhibition in 2013 where he has exhibited consistently since. Works are held in public and private collections throughout Australia and New Zealand.