"The Ghetto" Painting

Tineke Storteboom is a visual artist whose work explores inner journeys, silence, and the limits of language. Rather than developing a single recognizable style, her practice is driven by investigation: returning again and again to similar questions through different forms, materials, and visual languages. She resists repeating what has already proven successful. Once an image, structure, or approach feels resolved, she deliberately moves on searching for another entrance, another perspective. This ongoing movement results in a body of work that may appear diverse in appearance, yet is deeply connected by an underlying structure: cycles of departure and return, disruption and stillness, loss and re-ordering. Recurring elements such as circles, grids, labyrinths, text fragments, and layered surfaces function as traces of this exploration. Language often appears, breaks down, disappears, or transforms into something tactile and visual. Influences range from poetry and philosophy to spiritual traditions and the archetype of the hero’s journey not as a narrative of triumph, but as an inner passage. Storteboom’s work does not offer answers or fixed meanings. Instead, it invites attention, listening, and reflection. Each painting is an attempt, a moment within a larger movement, allowing contradiction, silence, and transformation to coexist.