Article of de Vries, Herman
Herman de Vries was born in 1931 in Alkmaar and began in the 1950s with informal painting, often entirely white, and joined the Dutch nul group and the ZERO milieu.
In the 1970s he moved to Eschenau in Franconia and radically shifted his work towards the direct presentation of nature: earth rubbings, plant collections, herbaria and the “earth museum” with thousands of soil samples made nature itself the image carrier. In installations, collages, text works and artists’ books he has since worked with chance, systems of order and minimal artistic intervention in order, as he says, to make “the reality of nature” visible. International exhibitions, including at the Stedelijk Museum, the Venice Biennale, Skulptur Projekte Münster and in numerous German museums, have made him a key figure in a concept art grounded ecologically and philosophically.
Today – decades after his first white paintings – his work appears both rigorous and delicate. Rigorous, because it is based on the radical decision to acknowledge nature as primary reality, and delicate, because it directs the gaze to the smallest traces: a leaf, a handful of earth, a stand of plants that has grown by chance. Herman de vries has made from the observation of nature a quiet yet extremely consistent artistic practice – an art that shows less what the world is than allows us, with the simplest of means, to feel that we are in it.
Location-specific unique itemWinner of the Gerhard Altenbourg Prize 2019The interplay between nature and artArtists with strong growth in value