Helen Verhoeven (1974) is a Dutch/American artist, based in Berlin, who grew up in the Netherlands and moved to the US in 1986. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1995 and in 2001 her MFA from the New York Academy of Art under Eric Fischl. In 2005/06 she was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, where she has been an advisor since 2021. Verhoeven was a recipient of the Dutch Royal Painting Prize in 2008, the Wolvecampprijs in 2010 and the ABN-AMRO Art Prize in 2019. Her work has been exhibited internationally in institutions such as the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, The Kestnergesellschaft in Hannover, The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Gemeentemuseum in Den Haag, The Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Museum Nikolaikirche in Berlin, The Saatchi Gallery in London, the FLAG Art Foundation in New York and Kunstmuseum Bonn. Since 2023 she is a painting professor at Dresden University of Fine Arts.
Verhoeven makes paintings, sometimes accompanied by ceramic work, stained-glass windows, print-making, film or installation. Her work ranges from very small to monumentally large and from simple and iconic to crowded and chaotic. In 2015 she was commissioned to make a new work for the new Supreme Court building in The Hague. Her 4 x 6 meter canvas depicted a densely populated courtroom full of judicial-and art-historical references. Her work concentrates on the human experience: the turmoil of the individual and the hysteria of the group. Sometimes finely rendered, other times crude, she appropriates and inverts the traditions of state-portraiture, religious and mythological painting, the muse, the nude, the fantastical and the mundane. Within a kind of trans-historic space, her paintings depict rapture, dispair, indifference, lust, aggression, and estrangement.