About herman de vries
Artist and botanist herman de vries is a versatile artist who brings together science, art, nature, and life in his work.
De vries does not write his name in capital letters, as he does not want to create a hierarchy. His work is guided by his experiences. His attitude, simply accepting and observing the constantly changing nature, enables him to truly experience and express the interconnectedness of everything. Language, coincidence, structure, movement, image, and scent can all be means of conveying this awareness.
“The greatest quality of visual art is that it can formulate something that cannot be expressed in language. This allows art to make the basic principle of the world tangible: unity.”
In the picture, framed: artwork by herman de vries, White paper signed and numbered (in white pencil), edition of 54, undated, approximately 2014. Origin herman de vries / YCCA Yssel Centre for Contemporary Art, Deventer 2014.
Nul (Zero)
From 1960 to 1966, herman de vries was one of the driving forces behind the Nul movement. Around that time, de vries created a large number of completely white works of art.
Fear of the white surface? I even left paper white. Blank sheets that I labeled with my name on the back. Once, they hung the back as the front.
White is void. The feeling of emptiness is important, but emptiness is not nothing. White evokes a feeling of openness, but also of totality.
White is excess
During the installation of the exhibition Nul62 at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1962, with an international group of Zero artists:
“(Piero) Manzoni and I had similar ideas about what we could make. For example: a cube 2 x 2 x 2 m, white inside and out, into which you could peer through a tiny hole. When you look inside you see light, but you can’t see the light source. So you’re staring into an empty white space and there is nothing to see. We also talked about our function as artists, and we agreed that it consisted of ‘deconditioning’. The deconditioning of the spectator was our common link.” *
“I have always operated from the idea of a zero point. In the Nul period I made white paintings. Later I did reliefs, homogeneous structures in which random structures defined the image. Through my work at the lab I came to the realization that research findings, including random structures as they are employed in scientific research, can also lead to objective visual results with no psychological element of any kind. Even now when I take objects from nature, I leave them unaltered. I never make any intervention: I leave nothing out and I put nothing in. If I were to do that, I would be taking away something of the object’s originality. ZERO is still an important point for me, to which I return again and again.” *
*From: Vaquity squared, Colin Huizing and Tijs Visser in conversation with herman de vries, Knetzgau (Eschenau), 2010.
Work
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herman de vries white€520,00