About Ina van Zyl

In South Africa, she created comics for the satirical magazine Bitterkomix, where black humour, physicality, and social tensions come together. This background subtly resonates in her later work.

Ina van Zyl’s oeuvre occupies a distinctive position within contemporary painting. In her paintings and drawings, she depicts intimate, often enlarged fragments of the human body, flowers, and everyday objects. By zooming in on details that normally escape our attention, she shifts the viewer’s gaze from the familiar to the uncanny.

With a strong sensory intensity, Van Zyl paints portraits, toes in sandals, body fragments, and landscape motifs. Classical genres such as portraiture, still life, and landscape merge within her work: a toe can become a mountain, a breast a landscape, a flower an almost abstract form.

Her work is included in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Centraal Museum Utrecht, Dordrechts Museum, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and SCHUNCK.