❤︎ LOVE OVER FEAR ❤︎

Magic self, digital and pastel drawing 2024 

Background of Jimmy Groen

YOUTH

Jimmy's work is mostly intertwined with his personal narrative. He stayed almost  his entire youth in the Dutch youth care system, of which almost 14 years in complex and very violent circumstances in foster care, which caused him permanent physical injury and complex trauma.  Because he was denied access to Mental Health Care services (GGZ) in the Netherlands almost for life, from 1992 he uses creativity as a means for imagination, processing, and communication.  Since he was eighteen in 1980 he identifies  as non-binary boy (Boygender).

CONTENTS

Jimmy works with pastel, watercolor, mixed techniques and multimedia. His style varies from figurative to abstract, and his topics include: gender and identity, youth care and trauma, nature, landscapes and the Arab world, and concepts from physics and four -dimensional space.   His works often show symbolic color schemes, transforming objects and layered compositions. He uses art as a bridge between his inner worlds and the outside world - a form of communication that invites empathy and reflection. In the works of and with "Tim and Alex" - two creative personalities - it becomes visible how age, gender and identity can mix into a unique form of expression.

ART

After a period of various volunteer work in archaeology, among other things, Jimmy decided to fully focus on art in 2020. He became a member of the joint studio Fantastike in Maastricht, where he worked until December 2023 - a forming period in which his first exhibitions took place. His artistic development was further strengthened by art training in Belgium, while focusing on various thematic projects and series, including Non-Inclusive Lives Matter, The Arab World and the portrait series Queer Identity in Childhood. This series was part of the victory of the gender, (boy) deprived of him in foster care.

Jimmy published two autobiographical works in 2020 and 2021 under pseudonym and wrote as a journalist about twenty articles in themes such as youth care violence and identity -destruction in foster care. Although his books are included in the Flemish and Dutch libraries as literature, these books have never become known to the general public. 

In the following four years, he studied Mixed Techniques and Experimental Forms - from collage - from collage - in 2025 he deliberately switched to a more layered, multimedia -oriented approach. His work was given a new dimension through the use of video, audio, installations and traditional handicraft in combination with each other, which considerably expanded its conceptual and technical scope.

Also in 2025 he launched the digital series Phantoms - an exploration of the elusive and surrealistic, inspired by the issue that Led Zeppelin once poetically stated: "What is and what should never be."

He is currently working on the Natural Form series in Nature, a study of organic patterns and the experiments of nature itself. Additional multimedia projects include There's No Today-a time collage that merges eras as a retrospective of tomorrow on yesterday-and Enter the ex-situ scale, based on a microscopic perspective. For Jimmy, creativity remains the foundation of his unique, alternative gender and identity - an act of survival after foster care and a refuge within his self -built world of imagination and freedom, living in a 'Magic Paradise'.