Ina van Zyl: Where are you from

In Where Are You From, SCHUNCK presents the most comprehensive overview of Ina van Zyl’s work in the Netherlands to date. In her paintings, she zooms in closely on toes, skin, flowers, fruits and everyday objects. What initially seems familiar transforms into something else through scale and colour. Her work slows down your gaze. You have to pause. And then you see more.

Ina van Zyl (Ceres, South Africa, 1971) grew up in the Koue Bokkeveld region of the Western Cape and studied at Stellenbosch University. In the 1990s, she moved to Amsterdam to take part in the postgraduate programme De Ateliers, where she further developed her practice as a painter and draughtswoman.

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.