JOLINE KWAKKENBOS

Early years and background

Joline Kwakkenbos grew up in a small Dutch farming village near Utrecht, where drawing and painting became a way to escape the conservatism of her surroundings and to develop her own imaginative world. She has described how the flat meadows, animals, and relative isolation of rural life fostered both introspection and a strong sense of fantasy that later informed her art.

Kwakkenbos completed a bachelor’s degree in Fashion Design in 2019, discovering that her visual language could transfer from garment making to painting during and after her studies. Her early fashion training continues to shape the attention she pays to clothing, textiles, and historical dress in her paintings, where garments often act as extensions of the figure’s inner life.

After focusing more fully on painting from 2017, she developed a practice centred on self-portraiture, using her own image to process experiences of sexuality, identity, and personal history. She is associated with the Tracey Emin Foundation and TKE Studios in Margate, joining a community of artists engaged with intimate, figurative approaches to contemporary art.​

Joline Kwakkenbos Artworks

Joline Kwakkenbos’ artworks are predominantly oil paintings on linen in which she appears in different guises, using colour, costume, gesture, and detailed settings to explore plural, shifting identities. Combining autobiographical material with fictional and historical references, she treats each painting as a ‘version’ of herself through which broader questions of queer identity, femininity, and visibility in art history can be tested.

Self-portraiture and identity

Kwakkenbos began making self-portraits in 2017, initially to understand aspects of herself that felt unresolved or difficult, such as trauma, sexuality, and the pressures of normative femininity. Early works, including a self-portrait in which she appears as Lady Justice flanked by two temporal versions of herself, set the tone for an ongoing exploration of identity as something layered and time-based rather than fixed.

Her portraits often depict herself as free-spirited, spiritual, seductive, historical, or vulnerable, oscillating between empowerment and fragility within a single image. Across these paintings, self-representation functions as a tool to reclaim space for women and queer figures within the traditions of figurative painting that have historically marginalised such subjects.

Colour, garments, and narrative

An intuitive use of colour is central to Kwakkenbos’ painting style, with heightened, sometimes unexpected palettes that convey mood and psychological tension. Backgrounds, fabrics, and surface textures are never neutral; they form part of a narrative scaffold that situates the figure in interior worlds shaped by memory, fantasy, and cultural reference.

Her training in fashion design informs the detailed garments that populate her canvases, which range from historically inflected dresses to idiosyncratic contemporary outfits. Many of these garments are conceived or made by the artist, and they function as both costume and armour—devices through which she can shift roles, try on different selves, and question expectations around gendered appearance.

Autobiography, queerness, and fiction

Kwakkenbos describes her practice as autobiographical but suffused with fiction, acknowledging that what she paints ‘is not always the truth’ but an expansion of what she knows herself to be. Themes of queer identity appear not only in overt subject matter but also in the refusal of stable roles, the layering of different personas, and the use of clothing and pose to challenge normative narratives.

In interviews, she has emphasised that painting her own body is a way to reclaim and rewrite stories from which women and queer voices have historically been excluded, aligning her work with broader feminist and queer currents in contemporary painting. Her self-portraits form a kind of visual archive of her existence, charting evolving identities while speaking to wider communities whose experiences have often been absent from the canon.

Joline Kwakkenbos Exhibitions

Joline Kwakkenbos is linked to the Tracey Emin Foundation in Margate and has participated in associated shows. In 2026, Carl Freedman announced representation and a solo exhibition in to be presented in Margate.

Select group exhibitions

• Crossing Into Darkness, group exhibition curated by Dame Tracey Emin, Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, 18 January – 12 April 2026
• Shape Shifters, two-person exhibition with Elissa Cray, TKE Studios / Tracey Emin Foundation, Margate
• Group and story-based presentations with Homecoming Gallery, including international fairs and projects highlighting her self-portrait paintings

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More Reading

Joline Kwakkenbos’ practice has been featured in interviews and profiles. You can read more about her work via her profile on Tracey Emin Foundation site.

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Ocula | 2026