Ada Breedveld was born in Dordrecht at the start of the Dutch “Hunger winter” in 1944. Together with Ada’s brother, her parents fled the ruined city of Rotterdam and returned back to Rotterdam, where her second brother was born in 1948.
Existence was difficult and hard, just as for any post-war child. Happily, Ada found a lot of enjoyment in drawing and painting. From nursery school age she grabbed every opportunity to experiment with colours and lines.
Not a single piece of paper was safe from Ada’s creativity. After her education she started work, but none of her positions gave her the enjoyment and satisfaction that she got from drawing and painting. So All her free time was spent on drawing and studying in order to improve her skills.
Ada experimented with colours, materials and different themes. A magazine in which the meaning of the word surrealism is explained, focussed her work on “the so-called free world”. The occasionally rather cramped realism was by imaginative. colourful and most of all joyful combinations. By this time, Ada’s artwork had developed enough to qualify her for a Beeldende Kunstenaars Regeling (Graphic Artist Regulation). Now Ada could do what she loves doing: dedicate herself to art. Her career gained momentum.
She came into contact with other artist and gallery owners and she contributed to various exhibitions, winning the public award at the Lijnbaan Artist Centre in Rotterdam. Together with other artists, who have a penchant for surrealism, she travelled to Spain, Germany and France in order to visit the principal museums in Berlin, Parijs Londen, New York, Madrid and Barcelona. This also gave her the opportunity to speak with artists and to visit new galleries. An explosion of drawings and colourful paintings followed. She got inspirations from her numerous foreign trips and meetings with writers, poets and graphic artists. Ada was inspired and formed by artists such as: Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Salvador Dali, Felecien Robs and Henri Rousseau.
In 1980 Ada received her own gallery in a school building, where other artists also worked. There she befriended Edward Luyken and his wife, among others. Together with Edward, Ada decided a few years later to move to Amsterdam and to take up residence in a factory premises, where they could live and work. Ada’s children befriended Edward’s children and together they started a new adventure.
Ada Breedveld became known a broad public thanks to her many exhibitions at home and abroad. Ada’s art became popular. She painted large fishes which are exhibited in a well-known Amsterdam restaurant. This helped her generate awareness among a specific artist public. It was in this period that she also went to Bergen aan Zee where her fish paintings were displayed in the well-known Sea aquarium. The work “Der Fisch Meines Lebens” (The Fish of my Live) was used for the cover of a German novel “Bite Wend(t)en”. Ada has been called the Botero of the Lowlands. Famous for her corpulent ladies and gentlemen.
Her new works seem to connect more and more with the naive artforms. Her best known works, in which Ada pictures her corpulent and vivacious women, originate from the comic series 'Sjaantje'.
Ada created this comic series for her mother, who had suffered from corpulence during her lifetime. Ada Wanted to let her mother come to life again in her work, emphasising the pleasant and jolly aspects.
Her paintings are as were a joyful renaissance of her mother. All this has been a source of inspiration for Ada Breedveld now more than 30 years. The joyful ladies are now popular with a broad public and not only in the Netherlands.
Ada has held exhibitions abroad, where she now also has numerous admirers. Ada’s works are exported to Germany, United States of America, England, Switzerland, Poland, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norwegian, France, Romania, Turkey, Argentinia, Canada en Russia.
