Return to the ruins

‘Return to the ruins’ part of the series The Heart Is there by Marijke Lambregtse
Mixed media on dung paper
In Return to the Ruins, the fragments of a broken landscape become a site of unexpected tenderness. The work reflects on the quiet, persistent ways care and love survive even in the midst of war—how hands continue to lift, cradle, and rebuild when everything else has fallen away.
Here, ruins are not only reminders of destruction but places where resilience takes shape. Amid dust and absence, small gestures of humanity become radiant: the sharing of water, the sheltering of another, the simple act of staying. These moments reveal that even in the harshest conditions, people carry an unshaken capacity to protect, nurture, and hope.
This little artwork expresses this contradiction and holds space for —how devastation can uncover the strength of connection. Return to the Ruins is a tribute to the courage to keep loving and the quiet belief that from what remains, something new and tender can begin again.

Requires framing, can be easily framed by collector or by BT
Comes varnished. Signed on the back with a certificate of authenticity stamp
25% of the profit will go to charity to support the people of G A Z A and/or S U D A
No silence in the arts

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‘A work is born from a kind of confused emotion. The work is an attempt to elucidate that emotion.’ Puvis de Chavannes

‘An abstract language that reveals references to an aesthetic figuration with a surreal flavour. This is the art of Marijke Lambregtse, an Australian based contemporary artist of Dutch origin, who focuses her artistic research on the relationship between man and the world, in its most hidden aspects. Her paintings are often characterized by the presence of human-like figures, whose facial features vanish overwhelmed by fields of colour, annihilating gestural communication and leaving the latter in complete control of emotions.

An alternation of more gestural brushstrokes and more detailed and sharply described elements, give the work a pleasant dynamism. Looking at Marijke Lambregtse's paintings, we feel out of place, in awe, as if we have crossed the threshold into another world and we are suddenly strangers. (Francesca Brunello)

Her recent abstract figurative works arise from a growing eco-anxiety and a critical concern for the state of the world today. Shaped by direct encounters with climate change, pollution, displacement, and environmental injustice, the work responds to systems that prioritise profit, control, and exploitation over care and coexistence. She seeks to harmoniously merge message and aesthetics, using emotionally charged strikingly colorful, acrylic paint, recycled materials, text, and texture to confront viewers with both beauty and unease.

A professional dancer, teacher and choreographer before crossing over to studying visual art and gaining a BVA majoring in sculpture at Griffith University in Brisbane she was awarded the Karl and Gertrude Langer Award which resulted in a solo exhibition at the Brisbane Town Hall gallery.

Since then she has been exhibiting regularly with several solo exhibitions, being a finalist in numerous art awards and has been widely collected in Australia and overseas.

Brunswick Street Gallery Small Works Art Prize 2026
Lethbridge 2025 Small Scale Art Prize salon finalist
Finalist Abstraction Exhibition Petrie Terrace Gallery 2025/2024
Finalist in Lethbridge 2024/2023 Small Scale Art Awards Salon de Refusés
Finalist in the Brisbane Rotary Art Show 2024/2023
Finalist in the Brisbane Portrait Prize Salon des Refugees 2022
Finalist in the RQAS annual Exhibition 2023
Finalist in the Amore exhibition at Artprenr Gallery 2023
Finalist in the Queensland Figurative 2022
Finalist in the Lethbridge 20000 Small Scale Art Award in 2022, 21, 20 and 2019
Awarded the Power of Creativity Art Prize by Contemporary Curator Art Magazine in 2021
Highly Commended in the Abstraction Exhibition Royal Queensland Art Society 2021
Finalist in the Rotary Spectacular Brisbane in 2019 and 2018