Ivna Esajas

Ivna Esajas is a Dutch artist whose drawing- and painting-based practice explores family history, personal memory, connection, silence, and the fragile relationships between bodies, time, and space. Working across large-scale drawings on canvas, painting, and installation-based presentation, Esajas examines intimacy, interdependence, and emotional resonance through fluid line, layered figuration, and an improvisational approach that moves between abstraction and representation.  Esajas graduated from the Utrecht School of the Arts in the 1990s and later completed the Blacker Blackness master’s program at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam in 2023. Her work often engages memory, family histories, Black life, and embodied connection, using charcoal, pencil, paint, and ink on canvas to consider what is carried across generations and what can be sensed between people, rather than only seen directly.  Her work has been exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museum de Fundatie, Metro54, Amsterdam Museum, CBK Zuidoost, and Kunstenlab. She received the ABN AMRO Art Award 2025 and the Mondriaan Fund Kunstenaar Start grant in 2024. Ivna Esajas lives and works in Amsterdam.