Artist Bio

Maaike Ronhaar is a visual artist based in Twente, the Netherlands. Her practice moves between portraiture and documentation, working with analogue and digital photography.

Her artistic vision took shape while photographing artists on stage, behind the scenes and on tour, in environments where intensity and vulnerability coexist. The magic of creation she witnessed there became the foundation of her work.

Through a personal search for cultural identity, authenticity, belonging, and a reconnection with nature she came to understand herself as an artist and photography as her artistic language. Beauty that isn’t afraid of its shadows flows through her practice, which creates space for people to fully be themselves, in any shape or form.

Taking the photograph is the least interesting part of her work. Each project begins with a conversation in which ideas, intentions, boundaries and vulnerabilities are shared. The intention sets the stage for co-creation. Intuition guides what follows.

Analogue photography remains at the heart of her practice. It is a natural extension of her way of working: its pace and limitations slows everything down, it asks for awareness.

She wants her work to be an antidote to an increasingly curated world.