Ellen Vrijsen (BE, 1979) is a Belgian contemporary artist whose practice moves between figuration and abstraction, exploring memory, emotion and perception. Trained in Illustrative Design at Sint-Lucas Antwerp, she began her career as an illustrator and was awarded the Boekenpauw in 2011 for her debut picture book Cantecleir. Over time, her focus gradually shifted towards painting and drawing, while traces of her pictorial and narrative background remain embedded in her visual language.

Vrijsen’s work inhabits a space between presence and absence, intimacy and distance. Figures often appear with inward or partially erased gazes, suggesting emotional states without fully revealing them. In her more recent work, abstraction has increasingly moved to the foreground. Colour, shape, gesture and texture become carriers of memory and affect, allowing the image to emerge without settling into a fixed narrative.

Working with acrylic, oil, spray paint, pastel and charcoal, Vrijsen builds layered compositions in which fluid fields of colour encounter sharper edges, fragmented forms and recurring traces. Her process embraces both immediacy and uncertainty, bringing together the raw and the refined, control and intuition.

Rather than representing the world as it appears, Vrijsen approaches painting as a way of seeing, remembering and feeling. Her works unfold as a fluid syntax of colour and gesture—fragments of embodied memory that invite an attentive, open-ended gaze.