Agniet Snoep

Agniet Snoep was raised in Rotterdam in a family focused on Dutch history of art. Her father, now retired, was the director of the Historical Museum of Rotterdam. Her mother is a descendant of Ambrosius Bosschaert, a famous 17th-century Dutch painter of still lifes.

As a teenager she rebelled: wearing very extravagant clothes, living among punk rock squatters in Rotterdam, immersed in dark literature and music, skipping from school.

In 1989 Agniet started taking evening classes at the Rietveld Art Academy in Amsterdam, moved to daytime classes a year later at the Audiovisual department, inspired by movies including those of David Lynch and Peter Greenaway.

Agniet graduated in 1994 with an installation that was subsequently exhibited in 1995 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in a group show called Couplet IV, curated by Rudi Fuchs, with artists like Jan Fabre. As a result she received a government grant to further develop her artistic skills using video, computers and photography.

Moved to New York city. In a sidewalk stall in Soho, she found rings with beetles cast in resin. Later on beetles became her main characters.

Taught Adobe Photoshop classes to students varying from high school to computer professionals.

In 2005 she started her current body of work, developing a series with beetles, inspired on the story "Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka, where a man (Gregor Samsa) suddenly wakes up as a beetle. In Agniet's work beetles adopt a human form in mounted photographs of scenes or film-stills, as fragments of surreptitious interaction.

In 2009 she made a video installation with disproportionately large and iridescent beetles who breath, sigh, growl with a loudly beating heart and two triptychs with man-sized beetles, standing as guards, eye-to-eye with the spectator.

In 2010 she found inspiration in a small painting of her ancestor Ambrosius Bosschaert, showing a dead frog surrounded by flies. The painting, now in the collection of Fondation Custodia (Frits Lugt) in Paris, is wonderfully interpreted and described in the 1930s by the famous Dutch writer/attorney F. Bordewijk who saw the painting at an exhibition in the gallery of the well-known Jewish art dealer J. Goudstikker in Amsterdam. While escaping the Nazis in May, 1940, Goudstikker tragically fell in the hold of the ship taking him to England, fatally breaking his neck. The small painting of Bosschaert inspired Agniet to make a series of still lifes featuring beetles, flowers, shells and other objects often found in 17th century still life painting, in a non-traditional stage setting.

Works and lives in Amsterdam, is married to an attorney with whom she has two children.