Though it has never been my aim, place is also, somewhat inadvertently, significant to me – familiar or unfamiliar streets, places remembered or new. Walking in and around Delft, it is the modest, orderly calm of its streets, its domesticity that attracts me; in Rotterdam it is the modernity of the city and its harbour, the River Maas and its bridges, its industrial areas and inner city streets, including those which were familiar before I left with my family for Australia 62 years ago."

Hendrik Kolenberg, 2014

Born in Rotterdam 1946, Kolenberg has lived in Australia since 1952. His early art training and career was in Adelaide, where he studied drawing, watercolour and oil painting, and taught art in secondary schools and as an education officer at Art Gallery of S.A. Following a period studying 19th century Dutch art in the Print Rooms of Dutch museums & at the RKD, The Hague, Kolenberg returned to Australia and held several senior curatorial positions including Curator of Prints and Drawings, Art Gallery of W.A., Curator of Art, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and (most recently) Senior Curator of Australian Prints, Drawings and Watercolours, Art Gallery of N.S.W. Kolenberg began exhibiting his own drawings and paintings in 1996 and has had several solo exhibitions and participated in many group exhibitions since then.