Jean Paul Vroom

Vroom worked across an extraordinary range of disciplines – painting, printmaking, photography, film, and theatre design – bringing the same sharp visual intelligence to each. He is perhaps best known internationally for his long collaboration with choreographer Hans van Manen, designing sets and costumes for the Dutch National Ballet and the Royal Ballet in London. As a painter he gained particular distinction for his photorealist portraits and trompe l’oeil compositions, exhibited widely in Paris, Amsterdam, Germany, and the United States.

His prints produced with Fred Genis at the Oudkerk workshop in Friesland – including Marilyn Monroe, Smiling Lady, Wrapped Body, Elephant, Horse, Male Dancer, Hands, and the Tropicana series – reflect his characteristic range and wit. The Friesland period inspired a body of lithographs rooted in the local landscape and farming community surrounding the studio, works that were exhibited locally and documented in the regional press. It was a collaboration between one of the Netherlands’ most cosmopolitan artists and a workshop deeply embedded in the Frisian countryside – an unlikely and productive meeting of worlds.

Jean Paul Vroom died in Amsterdam in 2006.

Fred Genis assisted a local Frisian farmer with the birth of a steer, which was named Frederik in his honour. The artist Jean Paul Vroom was so taken with the story that he made a lithograph titled Oudkerker Frederik in celebration. On the opening night of the Oudkerk workshop exhibition, the farmer brought Frederik into the gallery – prints of the steer on the walls, the steer himself in the room. Frederik was later sold to a farmer in South Africa, fetching the highest price ever paid for a steer at auction at that time.