Behind the Mask, Portrait of a Prime Minister Print

Harald Axel Heymans (born July 7th 1977 in Den Dungen, the Netherlands) is a Dutch expressionist painter, based in Eindhoven. Heymans’ work primarily explores the compository complexities of the nude, it’s religion, sex, and superstition. His paintings come in many shapes and sizes, both genders and all ages, young and old. It can be as chaste and restrained as a classical marble or as potent and provocative as a full frontal photograph. The varied emotions and broad range of the nude’s functions render his figures by turns a goddess, an innocent, a bather, a prostitute, a seductress, a social provocateur. Through the lingering and indigenously ambivalence about the decorousness of the unclothed and on the other, a joyously frank embrace of the sheer physicality of the nude, there is a great breadth of emotions conveyed in Heymans’ fascination with the female form.