from earth: kunsthalle ziegelhütte appenzell appenzell inn.
- Location-specific unique item
- Winner of the Gerhard Altenbourg Prize 2019
- The interplay between nature and art
- Artists with strong growth in value
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€3,200.00
Features and Remarks
This unique piece was created using soil collected directly on site, near the Kunsthalle Appenzell (formerly Kunsthalle Ziegelhütte) in the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden in eastern Switzerland. De Vries rubbed the soil sample onto paper in 2016, creating another wonderfully light, unique piece that straddles the boundary between natural science and visual art.
Since the mid-1970s, de Vries has devoted his work almost exclusively to nature as a theme. He began collecting soil samples in 1979 and has stored them in an ‘earth museum’ that has grown to over 8,000 samples over the years.
When he applies the earth to paper as a colour pigment, he grinds the crumbs and applies them directly with his fingers. A handwritten pencil note locates the colour in the world: ‘from earth: kunsthalle ziegelhütte appenzell’.
His ‘earth rubbings’ thus bring the pigment to the image carrier in its most original form, becoming ‘traces of a place’, the image material itself.
Site-specific sheets with reference to a specific art institution, such as the Kunsthalle Ziegelhütte here, are significantly rarer than pure location information.
Informations about the artwork
| Category | Mischtechnik |
|---|---|
| artist | de Vries, Herman |
| year | 2016 |
| Title | from earth: kunsthalle ziegelhütte appenzell appenzell inn. |
| size 1 |
Sheet
29,7 x 21,0 cm
Frame: 30,8 x 22,1 cm |
| material | Soil sample taken near the Kunsthalle Ziegelhütte in Appenzell (Switzerland), rubbed onto paper |
| edition | Unique |
| signature | Lower left labeled: from earth kunsthalle ziegelhütte appenzell Lower right signed and dated: herman de vries 2016 |
| publication | - |
| Provenance | Private collection Germany |
| rise in value | Works by Herman de Vries are known for rising in value. According to artprice, the value of one piece by Herman de Vries has risen 42.5% in 2025. |
Information about the condition
|
The Mixed media is in a very good condition Living material that changes as intended by the artist. |
Information about the artist
|
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. |
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