About
Eline Boerma lives and works in London. Boerma (b.1999) holds a BA from the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht, Utrecht (2022) and a MA from the Royal College of Art, London (2026). Villazan Gallery, Madrid presents the artist’s first solo exhibition in 2026.
Boerma’s works appear to be in constant flux. Like wind, light, or water, the paintings resist stillness. The work reflects on nature and society, understanding both as interconnected systems driven by internal contradictions. Rather than illustrating these tensions directly, the works embody them materially. The works are structured through tensions between abstraction and reference, control and collapse, movement and suspension.
Drawing on influences ranging from Soutine and Joan Mitchell to Rubens and Willem de Kooning, Boerma approaches painting as an ongoing research. Grounded in material experimentation, each painting emerges through a cycle of fast, impulsive mark-making, followed by long periods of observation and reflection. Traces of landscape and figures emerge and dissolve within turbulent fields of colour and movement. The abstract gesture is a relocating experience, moving between inner and outer worlds, between psychological states and collective unrest. The paintings record their own becoming, holding together multiple temporalities, speeds and states of matter. Immersive in scale and visceral in surface, Boerma’s paintings invite a mode of looking that resists immediacy and consumption. Elements reveal themselves slowly, like forms emerging through fog at sea.