About Rinella Alfonso

Rinella Alfonso’s work forms a visual bridge between Curaçao and the Netherlands. In her paintings, she explores and celebrates her identity. She describes painting as a way to break that identity into fragments — memories, thoughts, ideas, sounds, and feelings. Her style is layered and evocative: through transparent layers of paint, objects emerge that refer to the personal and the spiritual, while bold lines evoke associations with boundaries and confinement. The atmosphere in her work is intimate and mysterious — at times subtly unsettling.

Oil on canvas

She plays with contrasts — soft and hard, light and dark — challenging the common perception that Caribbean art is by definition exuberant and colourful. “What I communicate through a painting comes across more clearly in this darkness (...) On Curaçao, that unstructured quality — the chaos — has a unique visual dimension that I find beautiful.” Alfonso prefers working with oil paint, a medium that allows her to manipulate texture, transparency, and intensity. Her experiments with oil on canvas mark her as a painter in the truest sense of the word.

Rinella Alfonso studied at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague and was an artist-in-residence at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. In 2021, she was awarded the Royal Award for Modern Painting. Recent solo exhibitions include La Maison de Rendez-Vous in Brussels (2021), June Art Fair in Basel (2019), and Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam (2024).

Alfonso in the SCHUNCK collection

In 2024, a series of three paintings by Rinella Alfonso was jointly acquired by SCHUNCK and Stedelijk Museum Schiedam. This acquisition paved the way for her first solo exhibition at SCHUNCK in spring 2025, for which she developed a new body of work.

Over the past decades, SCHUNCK’s visual art collection has expanded to include a broad range of disciplines, yet painting remains a central pillar. Since the 1950s — with works by CoBrA artists and the so-called ‘Amsterdam Limburgers’ — painting has been a constant in the collection. The tension between innovation and tradition, between constraint and openness, is a recurring theme. Rinella Alfonso’s work reflects these themes and marks a moment within an ongoing process that SCHUNCK will continue to follow with care.