Kris van de Giessen is a Belgian painter.

After studying filmmaking for a year at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle (Brussels), feeling a strong connection with Pop Art and the work of Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist, she enrolled in a mural and monumental painting four-year curriculum under the direction of Jo Delahaut at La Cambre (Brussels).

In 1966, as one of the Fondation Belge de la Vocation’s award recipients, she was able to move to New-York. After being a resident of the iconic Chelsea Hotel, she lived and worked for one year in her own artist’s studio located on Canal Street.

A regular at Andy Warhol’s Ballroom Farm, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as well as Martha Jackson, Sidney Janis Junior and Waddell galleries, she met artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Brusse, Wallace Ting, Luccio Pozzi and Pol Bury.

Inspired by NYC’s vibrant large-scale art scene and by its creative freedom, she began painting larger pieces and creating art installations.

After moving to Paris in 1980, she explored traditional themes such as portrait, nudes and landscapes, and smaller formats, achieving luminous color through glazing.

The transparent glazes led her back to abstraction, rendering the diverse effects and shades of light thru juxtapositions of colors and layers.

2000 marks Kris van de Giessen’s return to large scale art, working with renowned Belgian architect Philippe Samyn : her 437,5 yards giant ceiling mural can be seen on the « aire d’Orival » ( Nivelles, Belgium), soon followed by several other commissioned painting for public and private architectural spaces such as a winter garden, a ribbed ceiling, several groups of mural paintings…

Still a Pop  Art enthusiast, she is now seeking inspiration in minerals, the cosmos, scientific discoveries and how they affect our  perception of the world.

Kris van de Giessen has always strived to create a visual language that is representative of the times, whether it is the optimism of the sixties, the free-spirited seventies, the impermanence and new scientific developments of the 2000s until today.