About FBVG

FBVG is a visual artist based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Her main project is Faces of Rape, which she has been working on since 2009. The idea was to paint women who had been raped, and had come out in the media with their story. For having experienced rape herself, and knowing how difficult it is to talk about, she admired these women who wrote a book about their experience, or told about it in interviews in different media. She wanted to honour them by painting them, and while doing so, making the subject more discussable. At first she made small paintings, since 2013 bigger ones, and called this series Faces of Rape. (FBVG tried to contact all these women to get their permission to exhibit their painting. She couldn't reach everyone. If you are in this series and you don't want to be there, let her know at fionabvg@gmail.com. If you do want to be in this series, let her know as well.)

Since 2018 FBVG started another project: FeMale Image. It's about the image of women, and men, and how they relate to each other. And how this image reflects the ideas we have about women, and men. When our ideas change, the image will change, and vice versa. FBVG wants to show these crossovers.

In 2019 FBVG started dating, which led to her project Faces of Dates, painted in 2020. The pictures that have been painted come from a dating app, and permission was asked for exhibiting the paintings online. The dates were of different backgrounds, coming from all over the world, but they all had reached a crossroads in their lives. So had FBVG, and there they met.

In 2020 the project Paint Your Pussy started. These are very small paintings of vaginas, based on the big idea of discovering the looks of your own body. More attention for the vagina is needed, and one way to do that is to work on its visibility. This title is chosen to encourage other people to do the same. In FeMale Image VII and VIII the vagina also plays an important role in the paintings.

Since 2021 FBVG is a member of an art collective, SAAC Amsterdam, which stands for the Sexually Abused Artists Collective Amsterdam. All artists in this collective have been influenced by the consequences of sexual abuse before the age of 18, and make work about this. FBVG has been painting the members of the collective in the series Faces of Rape, and is still doing so. She calls them Faces of SAAC.

Also, since 2022, FBVG is working on a monument for the victims of sexual abuse. For this project she works in ceramics. She made many small and a few bigger ones, until in May 2024 she started working on a bigger monument of 80 cm high, sponsored by the AFK, the Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunsten. It took nearly 8 months to make it. It’s now called the Big Monument, being an example of how a 7 meter high monument could look like.

In the same year, a mold was made for The Kids Monuments. These are small monuments, 9 cm high, for people who have been sexually abused as a child. They are for sale, and the new owner can photograph it on a meaningful place, and send the picture to FBVG. She will make a (digital) world map of where sexual child abuse took place.