Maaike Musabimana Holvoet was born on the first day of spring in the green hills of Buhinga (Rwanda) in 1993 . As a baby she escaped the suddering conflict that became the genocide and was adopted by a Belgian couple.
She spent her youth in Roeselare and now lives in Ghent with her partner and her two stepchildren.
Her passion for painting started at a young age and as a teenager she obtained her high school diploma at Sint-Lucas secondary art school in Ghent. She studied painting at Sint-Lucas college in Brussels and KASK college in Ghent.
Maaike keeps challenging herself and her art by using different types of media. She percieves painting as an exploration of uncharted territory. She chooses deliberately to give her paintings an objective name, because she doesn’t want to influence the direct conversation between her art and the spectator.
About her work
“A blank canvas is like un unanswered question that I attempt to answer. My first touches leads into a conversation with art. It’s a constant back and forth between colour and form. Josef Albers colour theory and his own rejection of it forms a guideline through my work. Not as a blatant acolyte, but more like a challenge. I use different media and materials in my work when it demands this. As such, every work is like a meandering conversation that ends with a semicolon. Because my quest never ends. The works of Francis bacon are also an important source of inspiration the ways he transforms and warps figurative shapes and bodies is something I humbly try to incorporate in my abstract forms. But in the end the influence of these masters is rather on a sublinimal level every work is an intuitive process, an essay of colour, media and form. Because as Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message”. Maaike