This is how I want to live
The first moment Marinka Reuten (1968) realizes that living with art is a possibility comes at age thirteen. She takes the train from Emmen to Rotterdam to stay with her aunt, Antoinette Reuten. At the time, Antoinette teaches at the Willem de Kooning Academy and surrounds herself with art at home. Paintings lean against the walls, art books are scattered everywhere, and her way of living and looking at the world feels completely different from what Marinka knows: freer, with a pull toward the unknown. "I felt it right away: this is what I want too, this is how I want to live. Or more than that: this is where I want to belong."
 
Revelation
Marinka decides to study photography. After secondary school, she takes an entrance exam at AKI (Academy of Art and Industry) in Enschede, where she is accepted. In the general foundation year (Marinka: "everyone should have a year like that in their life"), she explores art forms such as painting and sculpture; disciplines she had never worked in before. That year, immersed in so many art forms, is a revelation. In the end, inspired by Grapus (a French graphic design collective known for fusing political activism with free visual communication), she chooses graphic design as her specialization.
Her graduation project at AKI is titled (im)mortality, a subject that touches on the themes of her later paintings, which interrogate the experience of time.
 
Posters and newspapers
After art school, Marinka moves to Amsterdam and starts working as a freelance graphic designer. Between 1992 and 1997, she designs theater posters, supplements for the newspaper NRC Handelsblad (including the supplement Profiel, which wins a European design award), and books for several publishers. Julius Vermeulen invites her to design a postage stamp for the Dutch postal service PTT (now KPN). From 1997 to 1999, Marinka lives in Lisbon, where she also works as a graphic designer.
Back in Amsterdam, Marinka quickly builds a thriving practice. Among other projects, she designs for the Jewish Cultural Quarter, the Netherlands Film Festival, publisher Atlas Contact, and de Volkskrant, where she designs Volkskrant Magazine, published every Saturday. Marinka specializes in book cover design.

Throughout all these years, Marinka continues to make personal work as well. She discusses it extensively with her aunt Antoinette Reuten, who by then runs a gallery on Amsterdam's Prinsengracht. "She's the one who really taught me how to look," Marinka said in 2024 in Het Parool. "She did it by giving me assignments. For example: sit in front of Rembrandt's The Jewish Bride at the Rijksmuseum for an hour and write down everything you see. Antoinette also used to say: you can paint a tree or a person, but that doesn't make it a painting."

 
Solo
In 2022, Marinka returns to her foundation. She closes her design practice and decides to devote herself entirely to her autonomous work ("It couldn't be contained any longer"). She debuts with her abstract work in 2024, at the art fair (re)Discoveries in Amsterdam. In 2025, her work is shown in exhibitions at Gallery Fanny Freytag in Amsterdam and Yellow Gallery in Leiden, as well as at the art fair This Art Fair. On September 18, 2026, her first solo exhibition opens at Gallery Fanny Freytag. In 2027, Marinka will exhibit her paintings in Lormes, France.