For Herman de Vries, art is hidden in nature, waiting to be found. The Dutch artist embarks on a search and in the process unearths something quite naturally astonishing, with which he constantly plunges the art world - which he steadily rejects - into a delightful dichotomy of delight and confusion.
(...) Continue readingHerman de Vries - Informal and Aleatoric artist, author and publisher
Herman de Vries was born on 11th July 1931 in Alkmaar, the Netherlands. He attended the Reichsgartenbauschule in Hoorn from 1949 to 1951, after which he worked as a gardener and farm labourer in neighbouring France and in his home country of the Netherlands. In 1953, at the age of 22, he began working as an artist and was able to open his first solo exhibition in 1954. Herman de Vries was initially a painter, creating pictures in the Art Informel style and, together with other Dutch artists such as Jan Schoonhoven, orientated himself towards the Düsseldorf artists' group ZERO. In 1962, he took part in the exhibition nul at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which was organised by Henk Peeters. In the following years, Herman de Vries dedicated himself to aleatoric art for the first time and was one of the editors of the magazines nul and revueintégration. An important subject of his early work was the colour white, which he processed in writing - he was active as a writer, publishing several books not only on the art of chance, which he appreciated, but also on language, Ludwig Wittgenstein, plants and ecological topics.
Natural art from soil and plants
Nature became increasingly important to Herman de Vries' work, which he himself eventually came to see as the one true work of art from which everything else was drawn. He began to conscientiously explore nature, collecting soil from all over the world, even from Africa, where the export of geological samples is strictly forbidden - a Dutch diplomat smuggled the desired trophy past the controls. Carefully packed in small transparent boxes, the accurately arranged earth samples form an impressive phalanx of different colours, showing the complexity of nature as an art object. In his ongoing search, Herman de Vries does not shy away from drastic experiments, tries his hand at psychedelic substances and can also derive something healing from the effects of LSD. Nature nourishes the artist as well as the man Herman de Vries, who, with the exception of an occasional trout meal, abstains from all meat and lives a strictly vegetarian lifestyle.
A natural sanctuary for a hectic world
Herman de Vries now lives and works in Knetzgau in Lower Franconia, in an old village school made of unplastered stone. There is also a small garden and a barn in which he has set up another small studio – for the artist's real studio is the woods, through which he wanders in search of the next piece of art that he wants to make public. Sometimes it's quite simple: Herman de Vries simply fences in a piece of land, declares it a sanctuary and lets nature do its work. In this way, art creates itself - and man contributes nothing to it, but destroys it, as in the case of an area intended for de Vries' International Garden Exhibition in 1993, which was removed by the authorities as part of “maintenance measures”. The artist lamented the loss of 25 years of growth and considered legal action, but also emphasised that nature would claim back what had been taken.
Herman de Vries - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
