Pieternel Eisinga-Verhoeven

Pieternel Eisinga-Verhoeven (Valkenswaard 1933 – Waspik 2023) was a Dutch artist who studied in the late 1970s at the Department of Fine Arts of the St. Joost Academy in Breda. There, she was taught by the Polish artist Jolanta Owidzka. Her work has been documented in the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History with several reviews, and she was a member of COSA (Stichting Centraal Orgaan voor het Scheppend Ambacht), the organization that later evolved into the Louis Kalff Institute.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Eisinga-Verhoeven created wall hangings and works on paper. The works on paper often began as studies and design drawings for her textile pieces. Her wall hangings were acquired by municipal buildings across Brabant, as well as by architects, bank branches, and the headquarters of Fokker Nederland.

A recurring theme in her versatile oeuvre is the intersection of nature and culture. In her 1979 wall hanging Laden en lossen (“Loading and Unloading”), she transformed large industrial excavators into organic forms. The work was created while she lived on an industrial site in a small Brabant village—an area that bordered the Biesbosch nature reserve, where industrial activity and natural landscape coexisted side by side.

In much of her work, Eisinga-Verhoeven explored a refined sense of abstraction, resulting in stylized, monumental compositions. As she once remarked:

"What interests me is reducing subjects to their essense on a monumental scale".