Yvette Taminiau (b. 1965) is a Dutch artist, as well as an assistant professor and senior lecturer at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In her work, she balances and mixes both worlds. Taminiau’s newsprint paintings comprise a dialogue between the artist and the page. She transforms newspaper pages in an associative manner, responding to the images, headlines, articles, and the layout of the page. Her approach is intuitive and suggestive—while her academic background, with its strong reliance on analytical frameworks, is reflected in her selection of topics and articles from the newspapers. Dutch, French, and English news acts as her referential canvas, from economic issues to political coverage to cultural icons.
Taminiau obtained her PhD in Business Administration at the Rotterdam School of Management. She has been a visiting scholar at the Alberta School of Business, Edmonton, and the London School of Economics, London; and has held a British Council Fellowship at PREST, Centre for Science and Technology, Policy and Management Research, at Manchester Business School.
As a university student, to generate extra income and overcome a certain level of shyness, she worked cafés and terraces in the center of Amsterdam as a "papergirl," hawking copies of NRC Handelsblad to patrons. Since 2004, she has been painting on newspapers—first on the French Le Monde, later mainly on the Dutch NRC Handelsblad, with an occasional International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.
Going full circle, Taminiau's first publication of her painted newspapers appeared in 2005 on the cover of the culture section of NRC Handelsblad itself. Since then, she has presented her work at the Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum, part of Athenaeum Booksellers, in Amsterdam, and she created a series for an exhibition at the Center for Visual Arts in Emmen, the Netherlands. Her works have been commissioned by Birgit Donker, former editor-in-chief of NRC Handelsblad, former director of the Mondriaan Fund, and director of the Netherlands Photo Museum in Rotterdam. Her work is held in numerous private collections. She is represented by Municipal Bonds.