Michaël Winkel was born in Dordrecht in 1956. His parents, Antoon Winkel (Rotterdam 1923 – Dordrecht 1989) and Maria Hendriks (Rotterdam 1923 – Dordrecht 2013), were both professional artists. His father, Antoon, was a charismatic teacher at the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague.
Under the influence and guidance of his parents, he began drawing at an early age. It was clear that he was highly talented and that his creative output reflected a unique personality structure. Around the age of 14, he began painting alongside his drawing work. The quality of his works was soon noticed beyond the circle of family and artistic friends, resulting in an invitation to participate – as a 16-year-old talent – in an exhibition at the Rotterdam gallery Maas in 1972 alongside renowned artists such as Le Corbusier and Jan van der Vaart.
In 1975, he enrolled at the prestigious Rijksuniversiteit van Beeldende Kunst in Amsterdam, and a year later at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, where he graduated cum laude in 1979 in the fields of drawing, painting and graphic arts. His final project included science fiction illustrations in addition to paintings, drawings and etchings. According to the final assessment, “he belonged to the few students who cannot really be called students and for whom the academy is at most a very indirect sounding board for their idiosyncratic endeavors”. A collection of 1,300 drawings was included in his final examination presentation.
His drawings and paintings depict an alienating imaginary world with often dark representations in which grotesque figures, animals, eroticism and sexuality take center stage, and which, in terms of themes, is reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch and George Grosz. He had a preference for humans and animals, giving free rein to his imagination. He drew his motifs from religion, literature and art history. His work demonstrates an impeccable sense of composition and his images fill almost the entire plane.
From his debut, he produced a continuous stream of paintings and drawings. He enjoyed many artistic successes with exhibitions in galleries and museums in the Netherlands, Belgium (1987), England, Germany and New York (1989). In addition to independent work, he produced a large number of book illustrations and a unique series of gouaches for the publisher Kluwer. The Dordrechts Museum honored him with a retrospective exhibition in 1988. Parallel to this, his work was exhibited at the Dordrecht gallery Witt (co-owner was his lifelong friend and collector Albert Kuster). In 1996, the Dordrechts Museum awarded him the Ary Scheffer Prize.
Michaël was very introverted and any craving for success was alien to him. He lived in his parents’ house his entire life and struggled for many years with severe depression and other mental disorders, for which he was treated several times in psychiatric clinics. Following the death of his beloved sister Raphaëla, his father and his girlfriend Liesbeth, his productivity declined from the year 2000. He passed away in 2012 while admitted to the psychiatric hospital in Zwijndrecht.
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