The weight of the gloves, 2026

Francine Krieg  

Francien Krieg is a Dutch contemporary painter, born in 1973, whose work centres on the human body as a site of vulnerability, strength, time and transformation. She studied Monumental Art at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, graduating in 1998, and later developed her practice as a painter at the Free Academy in The Hague. Her early experiments included sculptural and installation-based explorations of the body, but painting became the medium through which she could most intensely examine physical presence and emotional interiority.

Krieg makes figurative paintings, primarily in oil, that are marked by close observation, unusual cropping and psychologically charged stillness. Her style belongs broadly to contemporary realism, yet her paintings are not concerned with polished idealisation or conventional portraiture. Instead, she uses the materiality of paint to make bodies feel simultaneously intimate and strange: a shoulder, hand, fold of skin, face or suspended figure becomes a concentrated image of human experience.

In earlier series, Krieg became known for her unflinching depictions of older women. She challenged conventional ideals of femininity and beauty by portraying ageing skin, weight, wrinkles and bodily change not as imperfections, but as visible records of a lived life. Her work has since expanded to include young men and boys, boxers, sleepers and figures floating or submerged in water. These subjects often occupy an in-between state: no longer children, but not yet fully formed adults; strong, yet exposed; physically present, yet absorbed in private thought.

Water, sleep, silence and rest recur in Krieg's work as spaces in which the body can temporarily escape performance and expectation. Her young male subjects, in particular, suggest a masculinity that has not yet hardened into certainty. Through moments of waiting, concentration, fatigue or surrender, Krieg creates images in which vulnerability appears not as weakness, but as a form of presence.

Her paintings have been exhibited internationally at venues and events including Galerie Mokum in Amsterdam, Scope Basel, Realism Amsterdam, Robert Lange Studios in Charleston, and the Zhou B Art Center in Chicago. Her work has also been included in exhibitions at the European Museum of Modern Art (MEAM) in Barcelona, including in 2019. Krieg was nominated for the Dutch Portrait Award in 2017 and shortlisted for Figurativas at MEAM the same year. She received third place in the Talens Prize in 2006 and second place in 2010.

Her work is represented in significant collections, including the ING Collection and the former Scheringa Collection. In 2018, she published , a book devoted to her artistic practice.