Blue Emergence

Penelope Van Hoorn

Penelope van Hoorn’s paintings operate through colour as action. The surface is active, charged, and responsive. Marks arrive with certainty, released into place through a confident, instinctive hand. Colour moves across the canvas in shifting registers, sometimes dense, sometimes translucent, allowing the work to remain open and alive.

There is a childlike quality here in its purest sense - direct, unguarded, and exact. The paint moves, pauses, gathers, then moves again. Large fields of colour hold space for smaller, insistent gestures that surface organically, creating a sense of internal momentum. Forms appear, shift, and re-form, generating movement that continues beyond the edges of the canvas.

Layering is central to van Hoorn’s process. Each passage of paint retains its own presence, contributing to a surface that feels continuously in motion. Areas carry depth and immediacy in equal measure. The paintings hold attention through vitality, inviting sustained looking and a heightened awareness of how colour behaves when it is trusted.

This clarity of instinct has already been recognised, with work acquired in 2024 by Agnes Gund, former Chair of the board at MoMA.

At this scale - around one to one and a half metres - the paintings carry real presence, lifting the atmosphere of a room through colour, movement, and a sense of active life on the wall.