Coufreur, Jos

Jos Coufreur is an award-winning artist with a painting style that fuses realism with expressive abstraction. Coufreur's works have broad appeal and are collected locally and internationally. Coufreur's work can be identified by its use of gestural strokes, bold colour combinations and a careful balance of recognisable subject and abstraction. Common subject matter includes iconic people, cityscapes and animals.
 
​Jos took up painting and drawing at a very early age. He first began to exhibit and sell his artwork at the age of 13 in Australia. When he was 17, his Dutch parents took the family back to Holland, where he attended the Royal Academy of Art in Den Bosch. Here, he developed his foundations in realism, among other fine art techniques.

Later, he met and married his wife, Hilly (also an abstract painter), who would also become his creative partner. Together, they moved to New Zealand, establishing a home and studio in Cambridge. After some 12 years painting from the Waikato, Jos had established a name for himself in the New Zealand art market. His early works have been described as "Romantic Realism" due to the inclusion of looser strokes and emotive qualities.

About 10 years ago, familial reasons saw Jos and Hilly move to Australia. Coufreur's recent works push the foundations of his practice to an increasingly loose and bold style, injecting dynamism and energy into his subject matter with the use of scraping, layering and blurring. His works tackle larger canvases, which enable the abstracted regions to take centre stage. Painting in acrylic enables Coufreur to work quickly, preventing drying time from interrupting the flow of the composition. Jos captures the subject matter with spontaneity and bold energy- one can certainly feel the artist's physical exertion when standing in front of one of these large canvases. 
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Coufreur has won numerous art awards for his paintings and has completed notable commissions for clients like Sir Patrick Hogan and Bart Cummings and the E. Sun Bank in Taiwan.