Berend Hoekstra at Vasco & Co – May / June 2018
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Ekiko’ enana 1993 papier – Mâché “Between North and South : Brussels is a remarkable city with all of its more or less separate groups, situated on the cultural border between North and South. Berend Hoekstra feels at home in this hybrid capital of Europe and of Belgium.” “Let us go back to the eighties of the past century. In those years, he painted large heads in an expressionist manner. Looked at closely, they could be seen as self-portraits, with a strange gaze away from the canvas, introverted, bordering on madness. The nose was often enlarged in these portraits, touchingly distorted, caricature-like, or wiped off. With these works, he established a name for himself with a number of important collectors. In the beginning of the nineties, Hoekstra invited me for a visit at his atelier on Zomerdijkstraat in Amsterdam. There was a surprise waiting for me. On and around a table stood and hung strange, intriguing small figures, not measuring more than sixty, seventy centimetres, made of papier-mâché, of a greyish-brown colour.” “The next time I visited him, he had made very large-shaped, peculiar noses of the same greyish-brown papier-mâché. In the summer of ninety-five, he was given the opportunity to show them in a large space at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam as an installation : NEZ-NEZ. ” “…, suddenly created a large installation as a sculptor with very unprivileged materials : crude, unfinished beams, grey carton and papier-mâché. Yet, that obstinacy, shown in the enlargement of, or focusing on certain physical details, had always been present in his work,…” Jan Hein Sassen, March 15, 2002 |
