Daphne Rijkoort (1987, Hilversum, the Netherlands) is currently based in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands. She creates vibrant glass artworks that explore the interplay between colour, light and perspective. With a minimum of lines, she captures space and movement. By constantly shifting perspectives, she invites viewers to look beyond the first fleeting impression.
Her artistic voice grew out of an early fascination with colour, space, architecture and human reason. At the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, she studied Interior Architecture, where she discovered spatial painting; a turning point that continues to inform her work today.
Since 2019, Daphne has been fully committed to painting. She began investigating colour and its effects on different backgrounds and materials, embarking on an exploration of new methods and approaches to painting. It was not until 2023 that she began exhibiting her work. In the same year, she developed a technique for painting on glass with Neopastel, allowing colour to reach their full potential and vibrate with light.
Through her use of colour, light and transparency, she invites viewers to engage with her work in new ways. She encourages them to move, pause and look again, discovering that a single image can contain multiple realities depending on the angle, the distance and the light that touches it.
Artist Statement
I’m standing in the Guggenheim in New York, breathless looking around. Completely overtaken by it’s volume. The space turns around me, and I move along with it; rising, playing with form, colour and daylight. What had looked like a white snail from the outside, nestled within the skyline, feels inside like a space that contains everything. I’m eleven years old, and I never imagined I would become an artist; and yet something began there that I would only recognize much later.
During that same trip I visited the MoMA. There, unconsciously, I searched for what lay behind the artworks; for the space that wasn’t immediately visible. Years later, when I viewed the Night Watch from the side, I realized what I had been looking for: to me it was a living painting, one I could stand right in the middle of. Ever since, I look at paintings not only from the front, but also from the side.
As a child I spent my pocket money on coloured pencils, searching for that one shade that caught my eye. The colour on paper often disappointed me; it lacked the clarity I expected. That became the beginning of my exploration of colour, of what I call “elevating colours”: colours that lift each other, that vibrate, enhance one another or stand on their own. Colour is healing for me, back then and still now.
In glass, all my experiences come together. Glass hides nothing: the lines, the colours you can experience in transparency, the layering and the reflection along the edge. It engages in a game with daylight, changing from day to day. Glass invites you to approach my painting-objects differently. Objects that ask you to walk around them, to experience the work in its mirror image.
Each piece is a fragment of a larger whole. Sometimes you see only part of it, sometimes a complete form. Their titles speak to their essence, and together they shape my artistic practice. With a minimum of lines, I capture space and movement.
I am not asking the viewer to understand, but simply to pause in that single moment where perspective shifts and art continues. An insight that arose in the Guggenheim and alongside the Night Watch.
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Inspiration
Every day is different, not a single one is the same. It’s all part of nature and that’s what fascinates me. It is my way of living, inspired not only by painters, but also philosophers, musicians, architects and other which inspire me the most.
Van Gogh for his longing and need to paint, his love for nature and his way of painting movement with a few lines.
Rembrandt for his humor and his use of light in that time already, with all the hidden secrets.
Frank Lloyd Wright for the Guggenheim museum New York. Which is my favourite building in the world.
Kandinsky inspires me with his round graphic forms, his colours and his philosophy on art.
Etty Hillesum for her longing to be as transparant as possible. To live through all facets of life, to get to know herself and humanity in an exceptional way.