Guillaume Lo-A-Njoe

Guillaume Lo-A-Njoe. "Landscape '59". Oil on canvas. 70x100cm

Guillaume Theodoor Lo-A-Njoe (Amsterdam, June 25, 1937) is a Dutch visual artist, currently (2019) working in Amsterdam-Noord. His work consists mainly of paintings, mostly oil on canvas, but also of gouaches, wooden statues and objects and screen prints. He is of Surinamese descent. Inspired by artists from CoBrA, Lo-A-Njoe developed a style that connects to this and is characterized by a powerful and colorful palette. His style is related to expressionism and is considered post-Cobra. This movement is inspired by the work of Oskar Kokoschka and Marc Chagall. Lo-A-Njoe has continued with it, with its own signature, in which abstract and figurative elements occur side by side. Lo-A-Njoes parents went from Suriname to Amsterdam in 1936. A year later, Guillaume was born there. He does not see himself as a Dutch or Surinamese, but as an international visual artist, with roots in the Netherlands, Suriname, India and China. Lo-A-Njoe considers himself largely self-taught but did enjoy art education from 1953 to 1958 at the Institute for Applied Arts Education in Amsterdam, one of the predecessors of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. In 1959 he received the Royal Grant for Painting and had his first exhibition in Café Eijlders on the Leidseplein in Amsterdam. In the 1960s and 1970s he undertook study trips to India, Morocco, Mexico and the Caribbean, among others. In 2008 Lo-A-Njoe celebrated its fiftieth anniversary as a visual artist in Amsterdam with a major retrospective. Lo-A-Njoe has now been an artist for sixty years and will show his work in various places in 2018 and 2019 and also that he has left the standard path: from rectangle to 6- and 8-angular paintings. In his own words: "To create for me is to witness my presence on earth". Source: Wikipedia.