Galerie Wit: herman de vries

herman de vries (1931)

herman de vries studied horticulture at Hoorn. Although active as an artist since 1953, he became a full-time artist only in 1969, after leaving agricultural research. Since 1970 he lives in Eschenau, a small village in Steigerwald, southern Germany. In his works he strives to abandon the personal aspect by isolating and presenting a part of the objective natural world. Inspired by his agricultural research, he started making 'random objectivations' by random placement of coloured patches, wooden bloks etc using statistical tables. Later he employed nature itself the randomization process: gluing autumn leaves as they fluttered down, preparing vertical cross sections through a piece of vegetation against a wooden panel background, randomly sampling and regularly arranging leaves, fruits, rabbit pellets on paper, or rubbing samples of soil or ash, These objects taken from nature, but also photographs and names of existing, or, sometimes, locally extinct plants characterize a spot, area, country, field of vision, or time span. Although the disturbed relationship between man and nature forms is a focal point of his art, de vries just reports by taking what nature happens to present to him; he reports and does not take a position in discussions about that relationship. He exposed in numerous galleries and musea in the Netherlands and abroad. His work is in collections of a.o. the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Gemeentemuseum of The Hague, the Kröller Möller museum, the Van Abbe museum Eindhoven, and in many public collections outside the Netherlands, including the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, the Bibliothèque Nationale Paris, the Museum of Modern Art NY, the Victoria & Albert Museum London, the National Galerie Berlin, en the Museo ideale Leonardo da Vinci in Vinci.

Since 2006, when the weekly Eslevier's weekblad started ranking the active Dutch artistst on the basis of solo exhibitions, publications, museum acquisitions and auction sales, herman de vries was invariably in the top 100 top, and usually in the the top 20.

Publications