Ilona Langbroek

Ilona Langbroek is a Dutch fine art photographer based in Hilversum, The Netherlands. She graduated with honors from the Fotoacademie in Amsterdam.

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Her acclaimed series Silent Loss is a deeply personal body of work rooted in her family’s history in the former Dutch East Indies. The Netherlands’ long and complex colonial ties to the region have left profound emotional and cultural traces. Langbroek’s work explores the loss of identity experienced by those who were forced to leave their homeland after Indonesian independence, and the quiet persistence of this emotional legacy.

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Through poetic and metaphorical imagery, Langbroek invites viewers into a dreamlike recollection of the Dutch East Indies—a place of warmth and beauty, but also of violence and displacement. Her photographs evoke a sense of nostalgia and melancholy, portraying a lost world that exists between memory and imagination.

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Using strong contrasts between light and shadow, Langbroek creates a twilight atmosphere—a metaphor for the fading past. Her use of chiaroscuro and soft, painterly lighting evokes the style of 17th-century Dutch masters like Vermeer and Rembrandt, and the dramatic contrasts of Caravaggio, yet her work remains distinctly her own.

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As curator Zelda Cheatle noted, “Ilona Langbroek is the discovery of 2021 for me.”

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Langbroek’s work is part of both private and public art collections, and is regularly exhibited at major international art fairs and galleries.