Riet Wijnen is an artist whose practice involves sculpture, photograms, working through texts, woodcuts and more recently, experimental type design.

She is interested in incomplete histories of abstraction, and what and who are already there in ways we might not yet know. To do this she looks to elders, hosting practitioners from the past and present within her work who have been active in the field of art during early modernism, or in science, philosophy, education and activism.

Bringing them together through fictional conversations and sculptures to reconsider histories and better understand what comes next, Wijnen centers perception and organizational structures through an interest in the, often abstract, containers that shape our knowledge, such as language and infographics.

This research comes together in the cycle Sixteen Conversations on Abstraction (2015-) and publications related to language and biographies of female modernists that provide sources for her practice while functioning independently, such as Saloua Raouda Choucair (forth coming), Homophone Dictionary (2019), Grace Crowley (2019), Abstraction Création: Art non-figuratif (reprint and translation) (2014) and Marlow Moss (2013). Wijnen has had solo exhibitions at venues including Kunstverein Milano, Milaan (2022); Manifold Books, Amsterdam (2019); Lumen Travo, Amsterdam (2018); P///// AKT, Amsterdam (2016) and Dolores, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam (2015).

She was a resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2017–18) and EKWC in Oisterwijk (2020 and 20023). She has participated in groups shows at, among others, SculptureCenter, New York; John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA, Portland; Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Utrecht and Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm. Wijnen also teaches in the Graphic Design and TXT department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.