Carel Willink - Litho - Unnecessary witnesses - signed l.r. - 1983

Albert Carel Willink (Amsterdam, 7 March 1900 – ibid., 19 October 1983) was a Dutch painter. He is seen as the most important painter of magical realism, a painting style that creates an alienating atmosphere with light, colour, form and depth. The images look real, but are only possible in the imagination.

Willink himself did not like the term magical realism, he preferred to call it imaginary realism, painting the imagination as realistically as possible. In his paintings Willink combined technical perfection, photorealism and an extreme sense of detail with a threatening, mysterious and unreal atmosphere.