Jean Paul Vroom was born in The Hague in 1922. The son of a set designer and painter, he studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague before moving to Paris, where he trained in engraving and printmaking and participated in the French Resistance during the Second World War. He lived in Paris until 1955, working as an illustrator and printmaker before returning to the Netherlands, where he developed into one of the most versatile and distinctive figures in Dutch visual culture.

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. see more

John Verberk was born in the Netherlands in 1942. After a distinguished career as an international illustrator and arts educator — teaching at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague and the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam — he returned to focus exclusively on his work as an independent fine artist. Now in his eighties, he remains an active and engaged presence in the European art world.

Verberk's work occupies a singular space — precise, surrealist, and psychologically charged. His signature pencil and watercolour illustrations combine meticulous draughtsmanship with an unsettling dreamlike quality, placing ordinary objects in compositions that reward slow and careful looking. A burnt match, a pair of scissors, a fist holding a letter — these are not decorative subjects but loaded ones, each carrying its own quiet tension and ambiguity.

His prints produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Oudkerk workshop in Friesland — Out of Focus, Burnt Match, Fist with Letter, and Scissors — translate this sensibility beautifully into the lithographic medium. The close-up format that defines his approach suited both the intimacy of printmaking as a practice and the unhurried, craft-focused atmosphere of the Oudkerk studio. Each work isolates its subject with forensic precision, stripping away context to leave only the object and the meaning the viewer brings to it.

His long teaching career at two of the Netherlands' most prestigious art academies ensured that his influence extended well beyond his own practice, shaping generations of Dutch artists and illustrators.

John Verberk continues to live and work as an independent artist. see more

Henri van Nes was born in the Netherlands in 1943. A painter and printmaker working in the lyrical tradition of Dutch postwar art, his work is atmospheric and quietly poetic — concerned with light, mood, and the particular quality of stillness that settles over ordinary moments and familiar places. His titles alone suggest his sensibility: rain approaching, a Sunday morning, sailing away, mysterious hours. These are not grand subjects but intimate ones, observed with patience and rendered with feeling.

His prints It's Going to Rain Today, Heures Mystiques, Black Wall, Fragment — Untitled (1976), Sunday Morning (1976), Sailing Away (1976), and Morgen in Mijn Kamer, were produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at his workshop at Oudkerk in Friesland, the Netherlands, in an edition of forty. The works reflect a consistent preoccupation with threshold moments — the hour before rain, the quiet of a Sunday, the slow movement of a vessel leaving shore. Lithography, with its capacity for soft tonal gradation and atmospheric depth, suited his contemplative vision well.

Van Nes worked within a distinctly Dutch visual tradition — direct, unshowy, and attentive to the poetry of everyday experience. see more

Little biographical information is currently available about M. van de Veer, a Dutch artist who worked with Fred Genis at his workshop at Oudkerk in Friesland in the 1970s. What the print Thistles reveals, however, speaks clearly enough — here is a draughtsman of quiet accomplishment and genuine feeling for the natural world.

The print combines two images on a single sheet: a meticulously rendered thistle plant, drawn with botanical precision and extraordinary delicacy of line, alongside a small inset landscape of the Frisian countryside — rolling fields, wind-bent trees, and a brooding sky that is immediately recognisable as the flat, atmospheric terrain surrounding the Oudkerk studio. The juxtaposition of the close-observed natural specimen with the broader landscape places the particular within the universal in a way that feels entirely Dutch in sensibility — patient, grounded, and attentive to the world immediately at hand.

We welcome any further information about this artist. see more

Jan Sierhuis was born in Amsterdam in 1928. A painter and draughtsman of considerable reputation in the Netherlands, he worked within the tradition of Dutch gestural abstraction that emerged in the postwar decades — a current that ran parallel to, and in conversation with, the Abstract Expressionist movement in America while retaining its own distinctly European character. His work is energetic and physically immediate, built from bold, confident mark-making that reflects both his training and his temperament.

Sierhuis was a prominent figure in Dutch cultural life, exhibiting widely throughout the Netherlands and internationally across a long career. He was also a respected writer on art, contributing criticism and commentary that demonstrated the same directness and clarity of vision as his paintings. His engagement with public and monumental subjects gave his work a civic dimension uncommon among his contemporaries — an interest in art as something that speaks beyond the studio and the gallery to the broader community.

His print Monument (1974) was produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at his workshop at Oudkerk in Friesland, the Netherlands. The title suggests Sierhuis at his most expansive — concerned not with the intimate or the domestic but with permanence, commemoration, and the weight of collective memory. Lithography, demanding patience and precision from both artist and printer, suited the deliberate seriousness of his intentions well.

Jan Sierhuis died in 2009. His work is held in major Dutch public collections including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. see more

Erik Karel Roos was born in Padang, Indonesia in 1938. He moved to the Netherlands and studied at the prestigious Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam before spending the formative years of his career in Florence, Italy, where he lived and worked from 1962 until 1978. That long Italian immersion left a deep mark on his art — in his preoccupation with walls, architectural surfaces, and the textures of ancient urban structures that would become the defining subject matter of his work.

Roos was a sculptor, painter, and graphic artist of considerable technical originality. His most celebrated works are built from incredibly dense, vibrant surfaces created through fine, repetitive vertical lines in coloured pencil — a painstaking technique that produces textures of extraordinary richness and depth. His key series — Albigesi, Muro (Wall), and Progetto per un Muro — return again and again to the wall as subject: not merely as architectural form but as a record of time, weather, and human presence, abstracted into something meditative and quietly monumental.

His prints produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Oudkerk workshop in Friesland bring this same sensibility to the lithographic medium — non-figurative geometric compositions of meticulous precision that reward close and patient looking.

Roos was a close friend of celebrated Dutch designer Benno Premsela, who actively preserved and promoted his legacy after his death. His work is held in the permanent collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

Erik Roos died in Amsterdam in 1994. see more

Josep Pla-Narbona was born in Barcelona, Spain in 1928. One of the most distinctive graphic artists of the twentieth century, he built an international reputation across a career that spanned fine art, illustration, and poster design — winning over one hundred international awards and exhibiting widely across Europe and the Americas. His work is rooted in the Catalan cultural tradition while reaching far beyond it, combining a mastery of graphic technique with a surrealist imagination and a sharp, sometimes unsettling wit.

Pla-Narbona's imagery is immediately recognisable — the human body fragmented, isolated, and examined with clinical precision and dark humour. Hands, fingers, fists, eyes, and faces recur throughout his work as both formal subjects and psychological symbols, rendered with a draughtsman's exactness and a surrealist's appetite for the uncanny. There is always an edge to his work — something observed too closely, held too long, that tips the familiar into the strange.

His prints Fingers and Fist, (1969) were produced at Hollanders Workshop in New York, in collaboration with Fred Genis and Irwin Hollander — placing Pla-Narbona within the remarkable circle of international artists who passed through that studio during one of the most fertile periods in American printmaking. The composition showcases his signature surrealist approach — graphic line work combined with organic, hand-like structures that morph and dissolve into something between anatomy and landscape.

Josep Pla-Narbona died in Barcelona in 2020, leaving behind one of the most celebrated bodies of graphic work in the postwar Catalan tradition. see more

Lucebert was born Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk in Amsterdam in 1924. Poet, painter, and printmaker, he was one of the most significant figures in postwar Dutch culture — a central voice in the CoBrA movement, which brought together artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam in a shared rejection of rational, ordered art in favour of raw expressive energy, folk imagery, and the uninhibited mark. His work, whether in words or images, has the same quality — urgent, playful, and shot through with a dark, sardonic humour.

His prints produced with Fred Genis at the Oudkerk workshop in Friesland in the mid-1970s reflect this characteristic spirit. The dedication To Niki Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely — two of the great irreverent figures of European art — speaks to his world and his friendships. The Sad Printer (1974, edition of 25\) is a particularly touching work given the context, a wry and affectionate nod to the craft and the man producing his prints. Machiavelli (1974) and the Hölderlinseries demonstrate his literary range, while Picnic shows the lighter, more playful side of his visual imagination.

Lucebert died in Alkmaar in 1994. His work is held in major Dutch collections including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. see more

Theo Kuijpers was born in the Netherlands in 1939. A painter and printmaker of geometric sensibility and quiet precision, he worked within the Dutch tradition of constructive abstraction — a practice rooted in order, colour relationships, and the considered arrangement of form within a given space. His friendship with Fred Genis was close and enduring, spanning continents and decades, and the body of work they produced together across two countries reflects a creative partnership built on genuine mutual respect and shared artistic values.

The earlier prints — Pyramids, Vleugel, Teken, Luik, and Tent, all dated 1978 — were produced at Fred’s studio in Vogel­ezang in Bennebroek, near Haarlem, These works reflect the cool geometric rigour of his Dutch practice — abstract forms rendered in carefully chosen colour relationships with an economy and clarity that is characteristically Dutch.

From 1979, as Fred settled in Sydney, the collaboration continued on Australian soil. Trapezium and Australia (both 1979\) mark the transition, and the Set of 7 in Colour Plates (1985) represents the mature Australian chapter of their work together — a sustained project that demonstrates how naturally the friendship and the creative partnership travelled across hemispheres.

Theo Kuijpers died on 28 July 2026. His friendship with the Genis family stretched across more than three decades and two continents, and his passing marks the loss of one of the last direct personal connections to the Dutch artist years. see more

Marinus Fuit was born on 12 March 1934 in Koog aan de Zaan in the Netherlands. A painter and printmaker of quiet distinction, he has maintained an active studio in Haarlem across a career spanning more than six decades, building a reputation as one of the more distinctive and consistently original voices in Dutch visual art.

Fuit’s work is immediately recognisable — orderly, serene, and subtly surreal. He takes the structures of everyday modern life as his subject: ship decks, buildings, lampposts, stadium seating, industrial forms — and abstracts them into calm geometric compositions of clean lines, stark shadows, and carefully chosen colour. Early in his career his work featured anonymous human figures rendered in grayscale, but over time he removed the figure entirely, concluding it had become superfluous to his real interest — the exploration of geometric space and architectural form. What remained was something quietly extraordinary: a world of sharp primary colours, precise shadows, and structures that feel simultaneously familiar and slightly removed from ordinary reality.

His print Detail of Ships Deck \- White Sea Ship with Pole (1978), produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Vogelezang in Bennebroek Studio near Harlem, Netherlands— The ship’s deck, stripped of crew and context, becomes a study in line, plane, and light that is as much architectural drawing as fine art print.

In 2007 Fuit’s lifetime contribution to Dutch visual art was recognised with the prestigious Jeanne Oosting Prize. see more

Erik de Nei was born in the Netherlands in 1941. A draughtsman and printmaker working within the Dutch figurative tradition, his art is grounded in the human figure — rendered with the directness, precision, and economy that characterises the best of Dutch graphic art. There is no sentimentality in his work and no unnecessary elaboration, only form, line, and the quality of light.

His prints Three Graces (1976), Three Graces No Background, One Grace Walking, Grace in Shadow, Stones in Shadow(1975), and Water Square were all produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at his workshop at Oudkerk in Friesland, the Netherlands. The Three Graces series takes a subject with deep roots in European art history and strips it of mythological elaboration, presenting the figures with a plain, studied clarity. Stones in Shadow and Water Square extend his interest in the relationship between figure and environment, light and shadow giving structure to compositions of quiet, understated strength.

The Oudkerk workshop provided the ideal environment for work of this kind — unhurried, craft-focused, and rooted in the long European tradition of artist and printer working in close collaboration at the stone. see more

Gerti Bierenbroodspot was born in Amsterdam in 1940. One of the most distinctive voices in Dutch printmaking of her generation, she drew her imagery from ancient Mediterranean civilisations — Crete, Jerusalem, the labyrinthine cities of the ancient world — transforming archaeological and mythological sources into prints of striking visual intensity. Her work sits comfortably within the Dutch tradition of precise, craft-conscious printmaking while reaching toward something older and more elemental in its subject matter.

Her series of seven prints produced at Fred Genis's workshop at Oudkerk in Friesland in the mid-1970s — collectively titled Labyrinths — is the heart of her collaboration with Genis. Ranging across Cretan, Jerusalem, and abstract labyrinthine imagery, the series explores the labyrinth as both physical structure and psychological metaphor — a place of complexity, transformation, and the search for a way through. Produced between 1975 and 1976, the works were realised in multiple colour variants including gold and black, each version shifting the mood and meaning of the underlying composition.

Bierenbroodspot's work is held in Dutch public collections and she remains a respected figure in the history of postwar Dutch printmaking. see more

Jurjen de Haan was born in the Netherlands in 1936. A painter and draughtsman who worked in close creative and personal partnership with Maarten van Dreven, the two were central figures in a circle of Dutch artists who found their way to Fred Genis's workshop at Oudkerk in Friesland during the 1970s. Like Van Dreven, de Haan preferred working in large format, and the two shared a sensibility rooted in close, frank observation of the human body and its relationship to the physical world.

Where Van Dreven's work gravitates toward clothing and fetish objects, de Haan's prints reveal a quieter, more contemplative preoccupation — the figure in motion, the human relationship with machines, the particular poetry of everyday movement. His prints produced with Fred Genis at Oudkerk — Walking with Bike, On Bike, and Black and White Close Up Engine — take the bicycle as their central subject, rendered with the same large-format precision and patient attention that characterises the best work to come out of that workshop. The bicycle, an object so deeply embedded in Dutch daily life as to be almost invisible, becomes in de Haan's hands something worth looking at slowly and seriously — a machine of elegant simplicity, and a vehicle for the most ordinary kind of human freedom.

The close-up engine study demonstrates a more abstract sensibility — mechanical form stripped of context and examined purely as shape, texture, and line.

Jurjen de Haan died in 2018. His work is held in the Rijksmuseum collection in Amsterdam, where a double portrait of de Haan and Van Dreven also resides — a quiet monument to a life and a practice shared. see more