Ronald Ophuis (born 1968 in Hengelo, Netherlands), is a Dutch artist. His paintings, presenting acts of physical, sexual and psychological violence, have raised high emotional responses and controversies. Biography Ophuis lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (1988–1990) and the AKI Academy for Arts and Industrial Design in Enschede (1990–1993). Ophuis often travels to take pictures and to find inspiration for his paintings. In 2003, Ophuis traveled to Srebrenica, where he talked with local people about their situation. The photographs that he took served as inspiration for several paintings. In 2010, he traveled with a camera crew to Sierra Leone, where he interviewed and photographed child soldiers. This resulted in a series of portraits of child soldiers. Work Representations of pain, suffering, and violence, such as the crucifixions, descents from the cross, and other biblical scenes have always played a central role in the history of Western Art. The work of Ronald Ophuis can be placed in this Western tradition of painting, but is different in that Ophuis’ scenes take place in our own world, instead of an abstracted, mythical context. In one of his best-known works, Football players I (1996), three young footballers force a teammate to the changing room floor a sodomize him with a Coca-Cola bottle. The recognizable motifs such as the changing room, the Coca-Cola bottle, and the football clothing make this scene highly familiar to the viewer. Other works are Sweet Violence (1996), Birkenau I (2002), Birkenau II (2003), and Execution (1995). Those paintings are representing sexual violence or are loaded with sexual tension. Other paintings showing scenes of perpetrating violence can be understood as part of war situations. For example, the Srebrenica series (2004–2008). A second difference is that many of Ophuis’ works focus predominantly on the perpetrator, while in biblical scenes the central figures are victims of violence. In these scenes, the viewer can identify with the victim. The scenes are part of a narrative in which the role of the perpetrator and the victim are fixed. The suffering victim is without guilt and, therefore, posits his viewers also without guilt. In Ophuis’ works, the viewer's attention is mainly directed to the perpetrators. One is encouraged to imagine oneself in a situation or position one does not want to be in. Often, it is not clear whether the paintings celebrate or condemn the violence,