Astrid Van den Bosch

Astrid Van den Bosch (1965), painter, works in Antwerp, Belgium. Self-taught, she has painted all her life and made it her profession in her forties — a practice built outside the academy. She has exhibited in Belgium since 2016, including the solo exhibition Be Bold (Mechelen, 2023), and her work is held in private collections in Belgium and abroad.

She works large and abstract, on canvas and on panel, building each surface from cold wax, lime paint, tarlatan, pigment and acrylics. There is no preparatory drawing: the painting is made on the surface — layer laid over layer, pressed, scraped back and rebuilt — until it holds depth, weight and light.

Her reference is the landscape and light of the Antwerp region, but the work is never representational. What she takes from it is a set of tensions — force against restraint, weight against lightness, movement against stillness — and her subject is where they settle: balance, held on a surface.

The result reads as both constructed and calm — a painting worked hard and cut back many times before it arrives at its equilibrium, a question she has been circling for years.