Ingrid Simons 2010-2020 
impression of her residencies and exhibitions

Ressonânçias da Terra, an exhibition with recent works of Ingrid Simons, had to be postponed to 2021. A pity, also because it was intended to be part of her tenth residency at OBRAS-Portugal.

In 2010 Ingrid Simons had her first artistic residency at Foundation OBRAS (Evoramonte, Portugal). She fell in love with Alentejo at first sight. This grew into a strong and lasting love. First she mainly made paintings inspired by the Alentejano landscapes. Later she started making ceramic works (see elsewhere on this page).

Ingrid Simons (1976) began her career painting church interiors and urban landscapes, and later focused on nature. Her aim is to deconstruct the first impressions of a landscape, reconstructing a new reality which reveals its essence.
When she started her annual residencies in 2010 in the region of Alentejo, she adapted this approach. Although she was still seeking what a landscape awakens in her and what makes a landscape sublime, she increasingly felt that the raw nature of Alentejo became a part of her being. The landscape got under her skin. During this time, Ingrid Simons shifted from interpreting nature to experiencing nature: connecting with its pureness and power, and taking time to submerge into it.  As a result, she now paints more intuitively. Her landscapes have become more abstract in form and colour. Due to this freedom, she has found the richness in cloudy skies, in mirroring water, and in the colours of dusk.
Her fascination with human/nature relationships has manifested in work inspired by artificial lakes in abandoned marble quarries where nature reclaims the manmade space. This subject is shown in a number of paintings and ceramic works in this exhibition.

GMT, an Evora based enterprise that makes cultural documentaries, made a poetic visual portrait of Ingrid.It highlights her struggle with one particular painting. The video is available at the artist.

Ingrid had six solo exhibitions in Portugal:
"Paraíso Escondido” (2017, Museu Municipal de Estremoz Prof. Joaquim Vermelho),
“Raios de Luz” (2015, Museu Municipal de Estremoz Prof. Joaquim Vermelho),
“O azul do Alentejo sob o meu olhar” (2015, Museu do Artesanato e do Design, Ėvora),
“Só os caminhos eram meus” (2013, Palacio Dom Manuel, Ėvora), “Jardim Secreto” (2013, Castelo de Ėvoramonte),
“A luz da Lua” (2010, Igreja de Săo Viçente, Ėvora).

“Paraíso Escondido” means “hidden paradise”. It was the title of an exhibition with paintings, silkscreen prints and ceramic works. In this exhibition special focus was given to her interpretations of the “Hidden Paradise”, an open space in a dense woodland with a creek and intriguing rocks. There, Ingrid Simons experienced the cycle of life: the strong greens of spring turning into the golden colors of hot midsummer. She felt sublimity and strength of nature emphasizing the nullity of man.

O azul do Alentejo sob o meu olhar was the title of an exhibition in the Museu do Artesanato e do Design. Ingrid showed ceramic works that was created as part of a project in which she studied the Portuguese Azulejos and the Dutch Delfs Blauw. She investigated what those two ceramic traditions could mean for contemporary art.

In 2015 Ingrid Simons started making ceramic works following Alentejano tradition (for which she established a collaboration with the master potters of Redondo: Xico and Luis Tarefa). In her ceramic works (azulejos, vazes, barrils and most recently small sculptures) she unites the ceramic Alentejano tradition with contemporary landscape painting.

Raios de Luz showed a selection of paintings and silk screens made in the past five residencies. The catalogue of this exhibition is available via OBRAS. It shows some for her works and also contains several beautiful, partly poetic reflections on her work by Portuguese artist-friends and other art-lovers and connoisseurs of her work.

At the opening of the exhibition Raios de Luz José Rodriguez dos Santos gave an impressive speech in which he explained how artists like Ingrid change the peoples´ perception of the landscape.
This speech was the start of an in-depth study on landscape painting with the work of Ingrid as the main highlight. Based on this study he wrote an essay: “Lógica da expressão, O País da Pintora do País, A propósito da obra de Ingrid Simons” (2019). At this moment this essay is only available in Portuguese. The next phrase gives an idea of the content of this essay:
The Alentejo, this half natural, half man-made landscape has a harsh and rough appearance, is full of sweetness and pain, ugliness and beauty, its tender and violent nature. Such as love.
Ingrid Simons gives expression of its tender and violent nature and leads us through all these faces. Such as love.

Biography
Ingrid Simons (1976) graduated in 1999 from the Akademie voor Kunst en Vormgeving, ’s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands. She is mainly a painter who works with oil paint on linen, but she also works in lithography, silkscreen printing, photopolymeer printing, ceramics, and short film.
In 2005 and 2008 she was shortlisted for the Royal Award for Modern Painting (The Netherlands), in 2016 she was granted the Stipendium for Established Artists (Mondriaan Fonds, The Netherlands) and in 2019 she was nominated for the Berlin Prize by the ISPP International Studio & Presentation Program of Livingstone Gallery. In 2020 she was nominated for the International Senefelder Award.
Works of Simons were presented in public museums, biennials, galleries and art fairs in The Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Italy, U.S.A, Russia and Japan. In Portugal she had six solo exhibitions (see this page). She is represented by four galleries across the Netherlands.
Apart from her annual artistic residencies at OBRAS-Portugal she had residencies in Berlin (Germany) and Hardangerfjord (Norway).