Paul de Bie (born 1973) is a Dutch painter with a focus on portraiture. Trained at the Minerva School of Fine Arts in Groningen, he creates paintings and drawings that reveal the influence of magic realism, symbolism, and the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. His work depicts figures and everyday scenes with a quiet precision hinting at things lying beyond the visible.
'Paul de Bie's pictorial language centres on the figure-in-the-room. Using a rich range of poetic details, his pictures play with the inner and outer, escape and refuge. Exploring the psychology of his subjects, using both realism and symbolism, he sees his paintings as a means to expres the fragile, spiritual world between life and death.'
- J. R. Purcell, Art critic Financial Times -
Roots
Born in 1973 in Groningen, the Netherlands, Paul de Bie studied at the Minerva School of Fine Arts in the same city, where he specialized in lithography and drawing. On completing his degree in 1998, his work was nominated for the Hendrik de Vries Stipendium, and 1999 he was commissioned to create a series of sculptures for the Academic Hospital of Groningen.
A wider world
Since then, his interests have shifted towards painting, and in 2004 a collection of his work was exhibited at the Horst Janssen Museum in Oldenburg, Germany. He moved to Paris, Antwerp and finally ended up Barcelona where he lived and worked for about eight years.
Recognition
After moving back to his hometown in 2011 he started portraying retired professors for the University Museum. In 2013 he painted a portrait of the city’s mayor and starred in the television-contest ‘Sterren op het Doek’, creating a portrait of Dutch actress Ellen Vogel. The following year he started designing posters for classical concerts of the Oosterpoort Music Hall and in 2016 won the public prize of the ‘AVRO/TROS’ art contest with his painting ‘Sabina’s Room’, which was exhibited in Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle.
Recent work
In more recent years, he has been focusing on commissioned portraits and painting murals, while his work was used for several book covers. In 2021 he started writing and illustrating a fiction novel which came out in 2025.