Background
Jacob de Graaf is a Dutch artist who studied at the Constantijn Huygens Academy of Fine Arts in the city of Kampen, Netherlands. After graduating, Jacob ran a gallery in the north of the Netherlands for several years before moving to the UK in 2006 to pursue his painting career.

His work and inspirations
Jacob specialises in painting scenes of an architectural nature that feature precise clean lines and a muted colour palette. Unlike many conventional artists, Jacob chooses to ignore the decorative features of architecture - paring structures down into basic forms. He comments, “My work focuses on form and composition. The surrounding landscape has been abandoned as I zoom in on the building, resulting in a near abstract image.”

When making sketches or taking photographs of buildings, Jacob is greatly attracted to blind walls, only occasionally broken by the presence of a window. These ‘closed-off’ elements allow Jacob to particularly emphasize the shadows and inter-connecting lines, distilling the essence of a building.

Jacob’s paintings also seem to play with the contradicting notions of ‘depth’ and ‘flat surface’. His compositions invite the viewer to see depth in his paintings, and yet the strong weave of the canvas and minimal geometric lines remind them they are two-dimensional. “This is something artists have been fascinated with for centuries,” he comments. “When looking at backgrounds of paintings by Giotto and contemporaries, one cannot help but wonder about the great abstract quality of the near sculptural structures witnessed there.”

This series of new work has been especially created for Revolving Gallery, using hand-crafted frames and materials by the artist.

Recent Exhibitions
Jacob has exhibited internationally over the years. Following a solo exhibition entitled ‘Great Expectations’ at the AYAC Gallery in Amsterdam, he then went on to exhibit at the BAS Gallery in Sneek, Netherlands alongside Erik Vos. Later he showed at the Fourth Floor Gallery as part of a group exhibition in Mumbay, India before returning to the Netherlands with another group exhibition at the Bart Kunst in Huis based in Nijmegen.