Marianne Breugelmans is a Dutch mixed-media artist whose work explores the dynamic relationship between photography, painting and material. Her practice moves between observation and transformation, using the visible world as a starting point for compositions that gradually develop their own visual language.

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Working primarily with analogue photography, Marianne creates photo–acrylic collages in which photographic images are combined with layers of acrylic paint, texture and collage. Rather than using photography simply as documentation, she treats the image as material: something that can be fragmented, repeated, obscured, reconstructed and transformed. Architecture plays an important role within her work. Interiors, façades, windows, staircases and monumental structures provide her with lines, rhythms and perspectives that can be taken apart and reassembled. At the same time, her attention extends to natural structures and the traces left by time — from fossils and organic forms to weathered surfaces and changing landscapes.

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Across these different subjects, Marianne is drawn to the tension between what can still be recognised and what begins to dissolve into something more abstract. A photograph may remain clearly present in one work, while in another it becomes embedded within colour, paint and texture until image and surface can no longer easily be separated. Her use of material is an essential part of this process. Layers are built up, interrupted and brought into dialogue with one another. Paint may emphasise a photographic detail or deliberately disrupt it; repetition can create rhythm, while fragments of an original image can appear in unexpected relationships. In this way, the surface becomes more than a carrier of the image — it becomes an active part of the work itself.

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Colour also plays a distinctive role in Marianne’s visual language. At times restrained and architectural, at other moments intense and almost luminous, it can connect separate fragments or shift a composition away from its photographic origin. Particularly in her more abstract works, colour, rhythm and material increasingly take over from representation. Her work encourages a slower way of looking. What initially appears familiar often reveals another layer on closer inspection: a photographic fragment beneath paint, a repeated architectural detail, a change in texture, or a boundary where one medium passes almost imperceptibly into another.

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Rather than offering fixed interpretations, Marianne allows these elements to remain in motion. Her compositions invite the viewer to move between recognition and abstraction, between the original observation and the new image that has emerged from it.

 

The original image is a point of departure.
What matters is what it can become.

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