Emo Verkerk

Painter, draftsman, and sculptor Emo Verkerk (Amsterdam, 1955) is one of the most important Dutch artists of the past decades. He became especially well-known for his painted portraits of writers, philosophers, musicians, and visual artists he admired. In addition to reading biographies, a photo often served as the starting point, along with the impressions and associations it evoked in the artist. Although Verkerk has freed himself from the traditional portrait with a realistic depiction, they still possess a striking resemblance.  

No endpoint 
This resemblance also applies to the sculptures he has been making since 2000: painted assemblages that he prefers to call 'objects'. For these, he cleverly uses all sorts of household materials, which he knows how to combine in surprising ways. Verkerk discards little; materials are reused, and remnants of previous sculptures find a place in new objects that are literally and figuratively layered. Sometimes the artist doesn't arrive at a solution immediately and continues to 'tinker' with his work, as he says himself. A sculpture can easily have three or four different versions before the right form is found. However, no work shows a definitive endpoint; it always has something of a possible variant. With this range of possibilities and associations, Emo Verkerk tries to make the viewer experience more than just the object. 

For the exhibition, works have been selected from his studio that have hardly been exhibited before.

Curator: Joost Bergman.