Judith Ansems is a Dutch painter, former chart-topping musician, and a licensed child psychologist. Her paintings of domestic interiors — rooms, stairwells, corridors — are rooted in a profound understanding of one’s inner world. Ansems’s earlier research analysed how children depict their homes to express emotional states. Those drawings revealed deep insights into family dynamics, fear, safety, and identity. Living space here serves a diagnostic surface — a structure through which psychological states are both encoded and disclosed.  This background shaped Ansems’ approach to painting. The domestic interior is never just a backdrop — it carries psychic weight. As French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in his Poetics of Space, “The house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind.”¹ 

Ansems paints with remarkable technical clarity and painterly control. Each composition is built with a clear architectural logic: lines are sharply rendered, surfaces precisely defined, light distributed with studied balance. Her brushwork reveals training in academic technique, rooted in classical draftsmanship. And yet, it is hard to call her work “photorealism” — there is something absent from the mimetic whole. This is intentional. Ansems deliberately subverts composition to feel — ever so slightly — off. These calculated shifts in perspective create a tension that stops the viewer in their tracks, makes the eye stumble and recalibrate, and, eventually, engage with the pictorial space on a deeper level.

This spatial dissonance becomes all the more resonant when we consider some of her subject matter. Many of Ansems’s paintings depict transitional spaces: corridors, staircases, entryways, bathrooms. These are not places we typically inhabit at length. They register a broader cultural and psychological condition: a state of in-betweenness. It’s what Sun Ah Hwang calls the “public‑private gradient,” places that belong to neither and shape our emotional experience of transit.² As routines, roles, and identities become less fixed, we spend more time suspended between definitions — between places, between decisions, between versions of ourselves. Liminality becomes less and less temporary.

This is the opportunity her work presents. In refusing clarity, she creates space for reflection — on how we live now, how we inhabit uncertainty, and how we might begin to understand our own interiors through the ones we pass through or build around us. Ansems removes all cues that might locate her paintings in a specific time or story. There is nothing to follow, only the viewer’s own response. What surfaces is a heightened awareness — of tension, calm, control, disquiet — and, ultimately, of the self. Ultimately, what Judith Ansems offers through her masterful work are rare conditions in which we just might, if we choose, begin to understand ourselves more fully.

Sources:
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).
Sun Ah Hwang, Stairs: On Liminality and Social Collectives (MSc thesis, TU Delft, 2021).