Rene Rietmeyer was born in 1957 in ’s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands. After studying psychology in Innsbruck, (Austria), he was the founding director of a private art academy in Greece. From 1994 he traveled intensely, with long stays in Japan, Germany, Canada, France, Ireland, The Netherlands and the USA, among other places.

After a phase of figurative painting while becoming acquainted with the work of fauvist artists, Rietmeyer, then in Southern France, started making his own art form of the “Boxes”, stimulated by American minimal art and the so-called new abstraction. The boxes are three-dimensional objects, most often painted on five sides, which are presented on the wall or on the floor in multi-part, variable installations.

Although he works with many various materials, such as concrete, metal, glass, silicone and glue, nevertheless, oil paint remains his preferred material. Departing from the conviction that even a minimalist approach cannot produce a completely depersonalized, “objective” work of art free of emotion, Rietmeyer, with these Boxes (and since 1998, also with his “Objects on Paper”), dedicates himself to the task of making visible the subjectively felt effect of cities and landscapes. This comes about with the purely abstract formal means of color, form, material, surface structure, composition and the installation in space. Rietmeyer has been using his concept in his portrait series for the subjective experience of meetings with certain persons as well.

Rene Rietmeyer’s “Boxes” address his existence within time and space. The Boxes ‘contain’ Rietmeyer’s thoughts and express his experience of a specific region, city or person. Creating a certain atmosphere, they convey the artist’s emotional relationship to the subject through the abstract means of form, color, texture, composition, and choice of materials. In doing so, simultaneously, the Boxes admit something about Rietmeyer himself: “Ultimately, my work is nothing other than the proof of my existence.”

Rietmeyer is the initiator of the project “Personal Structures” which first published in 2003 and has since grown to become a worldwide respected project with artist’s who’s main subject is Time-Space-Existence. This multinational project, linked to the Global Art Affair Foundation and the European Cultural Centre and many times to the Venice Biennale, has an intense activity promoting high quality contemporary art.