William van Hoorn (b. 2000, London) is a British–Spanish abstract painter whose practice investigates notions of purity, conscience, and perception through a sustained engagement with the natural world. Nature functions not merely as subject matter, but as a pedagogical and metaphysical framework through which questions of balance, beauty, and relationality are explored.
His work considers the underlying structures and rhythms that govern natural phenomena, seeking to translate these intangible forces into abstract visual form. Informed by the formal sensibilities of early- and mid-twentieth-century art and design, van Hoorn employs a design-led approach that balances intuition with order, allowing compositions to emerge through a process of observation, reflection, and response.
Darn That Dream
William Van Hoorn’s artistic practice is a meditation on how encounter determines style. Unlike those who pull from the peculiar movements inside the self to give a strange and random experience some recognisable form, Van Hoorn allows experience to remain strange and random, balancing what is discovered through colour, shape, and spatial relation until a vague portrait of the artist emerges. For Van Hoorn, creating artworks is a process of decoding that produces forms and not explanations. Within every painting are a multitude of experiences that take form according to how they were encountered, and it isn’t until an independent form is placed in relation with others across the pictorial field that the independent character of a form becomes announced. This is because Van Hoorn works according to the philosophy of ‘Relationality,’ believing that nothing first exists with an independent identity, and that everything must come together in a context for meaning to appear, even if meaning itself remains unintelligible. Through this repeated process of encounter and formation, decoding and relation, Van Hoorn has developed a distinct visual language that is both intelligent and intangible.
Despite their minimalist construction, each form possesses an unmistakable, exaggerated Surrealist character. Circles, spikes, organic contours and other ambiguous shapes appear across the paintings with a familiarity of things discovered in the natural world, without ever
settling into anything genuinely recognisable. When completed, the works begin to resemble celestial landscapes or diagrams of unknown natural orders, and these associations with the natural world of objects and things are recognised by Van Hoorn himself, referenced in titles for paintings such as Cosmic Lullaby (In Green), 2026, Spring Fragments, 2026, and Solar Composition, 2026