Bidspirit auction | Marloes Hakkers

Marloes Hakkers - ''The Distant Gaze'' 2025. A portrait of Orly, painted from life across four sessions. She sits in a pose caught between  arriving and leaving, her thoughts somewhere far away. Light moves across the fabric of her  clothes and the sofa in warm shifts from brightness to shadow, giving the work a quiet, timeless  quality. The painting carries echoes of Breitner and the Japanese-influenced realism that shaped  an earlier era. Classical in feeling, intimate in presence. oil on canvas 70/90 cm signed Marloes Hakkers is a figurative painter based in Tel Aviv, originally from the Netherlands. Born into a working-class family, she grew up in a single-mother household where pursuing a career in painting simply didn’t feel like a possibility. Nine years ago she moved to Israel, and it was here, with the support of her husband, that she finally gave herself permission to pursue what she couldn’t ignore. Her entire artistic education took place in Israel: she studied for a year at the Jerusalem Studio School under Yedidya Hershberg and Deborah Sebaoun, continued with courses under Ilya Gefter, and has since been studying with David Nipo. Israel didn’t just become her home; it became the place where she became a painter. Her work moves between portrait, still life, and landscape, though subject matter is secondary to her. Whether it’s a face or a lemon, it always comes down to shape, light, and perception. She paints because she has to. It is, as she puts it, “the one constant in my life that never leaves.” ''I often find myself questioning what realism really is. We like to think we see and paint “reality, ” but every painting is just a frozen moment of perception, a mix of observation and interpretation. My work is rooted in looking closely: at light, at form, at fleeting moments.''