Ans Wortel

Ans Wortel (Alkmaar, 1929 - Hilvarenbeek, 1996) was a self-taught Dutch painter who also worked as a poet and writer. She is considered one of the leading women artists of postwar Dutch modern art, and in 1963 she won the first prize at the Paris Biennale. She worked in watercolour, drawing, collage, lithography, etching and sculpture.

Her work is strongly autobiographical: her experiences as a young woman, a mother and an artist provided most of her subject matter, including human emotions, love, relationships, the mother-child bond and social criticism. Until the late 1950s she searched for a personal style, showing traces of artists such as Hokusai, De Kooning, Chagall, Picasso, Wifredo Lam and Karel Appel. She eventually arrived at a figurative-abstract manner: women, men and children, sometimes recognisable but always distorted, seek, embrace or repel one another in undefined spaces. The moon, the sun and the outlines of the earth recur often, usually accompanied by lines of handwritten poetry.

She exhibited widely in the Netherlands and abroad, including at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. She also published several collections of poetry in which visual art and verse appear together, and wrote an autobiography in five volumes, begun in 1980 and completed in 1986. Her legacy lies largely in her fusion of image and text.