Jimmy Groen (1962, Apeldoorn) is an autodidact artist working at the intersection of science, perception, and personal reconstruction. His work — raw, layered, and technically experimental — emerges from a life story that defies conventional narratives.

Jimmy spent nearly fourteen years in Dutch foster care under extreme conditions of forced social isolation, resulting in permanent physical injury. The Dutch Public Prosecution Service and the Ministry of Justice refused to investigate his case due to their own involvement, and for decades actively worked to suppress it. After leaving the youth care system, he was met with extreme hostility from Dutch governmental  institutions,  determined to silence him. His case was only officially acknowledged in 2018 and 2019. 

Out of necessity, Jimmy began creating art in 1992. With no formal education, no network, and no support, he started drawing, building, and experimenting with found and self-developed materials. His work is not an aesthetic exercise but a form of reconstruction — of identity, of space, of time. Each project is an attempt to grasp a world that long excluded him.

His installations, drawings, and digital experiments are charged with this energy: they are testimonies of a life that cannot be reduced to statistics or stereotypes.

Jimmy has published two autobiographical books under a pseudonym (2020 and 2021), with more forthcoming under a different name.

He currently works from his studio in Slenaken, where he combines his artistic practice with research into perception, microclimates, and the role of technology in human resilience. He has exhibited in the Netherlands and Belgium and was part of the artist collective SoHo Galleri in Sweden. He is currently developing a new body of work in which nature plays a central role.