Berend Hoekstra, Dutch artist living in Brussels the last 20 years

Berend Hoekstra, Dutch artist living in Brussels the last 20 years
“….one sees the combination of animals, often imaginary,
hybrid forms, loose limbs, membra disjecta, directions that also include precise visual quotation from such artefacts as war-clubs, walking sticks, weapons, and then the radiating out into avian and piscian motifs, somethimes creating intermediate forms, that can be seen as either surreal or grotesque, elements of marine life and shells, all of it modulated by what can be described as a painterly concern.”

“… The installation of the sculpture in library  stacks projecting from rows of books, or the hanging of his ensemble from a wire suspended from the ceiling, or, the simple placing on the ground of a work, objects suspended in mid-air, have the illusionof being werghtless, but are sometimes cast in aluminium and made to appear like papier-maché, and vice versa.”

“There is, it should be emphasised, an immense, playful creativity in Hoekstra’s sculptures,…”

Patrick Healy, Dublin, 2002