Biography

Jakob Fioole (1978) is a Dutch painter, currently living and working in Greater Boston, U.S. He grew up in Breda, The Netherlands.

After high school and spending a year at a technical engineering college, Fioole attended art school. The first years were mainly occupied by drawing, often challenging himself by using various kinds of (physical) restraints to help explore the depth of the medium. After switching art schools in 1999 he started using paint in his drawings and soon became fascinated by the resistance found in the complexity of oil paint. Moving to the U.S. in later life, the country's cultural make-up and urban environments became influential to his work.  

"I like to see my work as an actual place.  A city or ghost town that I am building with paintings.  Every piece reveals another part of this parallel world. I'm interested in a certain sense of absence and the manifestation of decay. It makes you wonder if something was different in another time, and how. Old photographs often share this quality too, you might question how much of what you see is actually real. Maybe you are looking at someone else's memories. Let the ghost town be my city."