• Helen van Stolk reimagines Impressionism through a contemporary lens, creating paintings that honour its devotion to light, atmosphere, and fleeting...

    Installation Summer Salon, 2025

    Candice Berman Gallery

    Rosebank, Johannesburg

    Helen van Stolk reimagines Impressionism through a contemporary lens, creating paintings that honour its devotion to light, atmosphere, and fleeting moments while extending the tradition into new emotional registers. Her canvases shimmer with immediacy, glimpses of light on water, the quiet shift of air through leaves, the glow of dusk, yet these images are never fixed. Instead, they hover between clarity and ambiguity, reflecting how memory and perception are always in motion.

     

    Through gestural mark-making and abstraction, van Stolk transforms the Impressionist pursuit of the ephemeral into a deeper exploration of feeling. She reminds us that what we see is inseparable from what we sense, that the transient beauty of daily life is as much emotional as visual. In her work, echoes of the past converse with contemporary rhythms, blurring boundaries between time, tradition, and the present moment.

    Van Stolk’s paintings invite us to slow down, inhabit the now, and recognize the fragile yet enduring grace in ordinary encounters.

    • Helen van Stolk, Dreams on Water, 2025
      Helen van Stolk, Dreams on Water, 2025
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    • Helen van Stolk, Waves of gold, 2025
      Helen van Stolk, Waves of gold, 2025
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    • Helen van Stolk, We might as well Dance, 2025
      Helen van Stolk, We might as well Dance, 2025
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  • By embracing abstraction and experimental mark-making, van Stolk builds upon Impressionism’s legacy while moving it firmly into the present. The...

    By embracing abstraction and experimental mark-making, van Stolk builds upon Impressionism’s legacy while moving it firmly into the present. The canvas becomes a site where past and present coalesce: echoes of Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro shimmer beneath the contemporary rhythms of her hand. Yet it is the spaces she leaves unresolved, he blurs, veils, and dissolving forms, that remind us that memory and perception are never complete, always in flux.

    Through her practice, Helen van Stolk asks us to slow down, to inhabit the moment, and to recognize the fragile beauty embedded in ordinary encounters. Her work illuminates the enduring power of Impressionism, not as nostalgia, but as a living tradition continually reimagined. In her paintings, time collapses, and we are reminded that light, emotion, and the fleeting grace of the everyday remain as vital now as they were more than a century ago.

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  • Helen van Stolk’s paintings open a luminous dialogue between history and the present, inviting us to see Impressionism not as...

    Helen van Stolk’s paintings open a luminous dialogue between history and the present, inviting us to see Impressionism not as a closed chapter in art history, but as an ever-evolving language of perception. Rooted in the genre’s dedication to light, atmosphere, and the transient beauty of daily life, her works reimagine these qualities through a distinctly contemporary sensibility. Brushstrokes, gestures, and textures become not only tools of representation but also acts of meditation, reminders that seeing is always an emotional, embodied experience.\

     

    In her canvases, moments unfold with a shimmering immediacy: a flicker of light across water, a breeze shifting through leaves, the tender glow of twilight. These are not static depictions, but rather impressions renewed, fragments of memory and perception layered into surfaces that oscillate between clarity and ambiguity. Where the Impressionists sought to capture the fleeting instant, van Stolk extends this impulse into the realm of feeling. Her paintings reveal how the ephemeral is not only visual but also emotional, resonating with the shifting inner landscapes of the viewer.