What brings someone born in the Dutch lowlands of Alkmaar to the hilly low mountain range of the Franconian Steigerwald, more precisely to Eschenau, and what has kept him there for fifty-one years?
Certainly not the nearby cola factory in Knetzgau, rather it is the peculiarities of the local nature that are the constant stimulus or challenge for a trained gardener, biologist and Land Art artist like Herman de Vries and in whose forests he is the basic element of those pictures for which he is known: Abrasions from “rare earths” that he collects on his extensive daily hikes through the astonishingly diverse nature of the Steigerwald and rubbed into the textile structure on white primed canvas - mostly in a square shape.
Luminous stained glass windows made of earth
Stefan Trinks
Editor in the features section.
Follow I follow
Almost parallel to Gerhard Richter's color square puzzles and in front of his huge glass window for Cologne Cathedral, de Vries' earth color blocks, which are also determined by light, derive their luminosity from delicate clay yellow to rosé loess to deep brown in the forest floor, not primarily from the incident light, but rather of the mineral components of the varied soils in the area. Anyone who sees him shuffling across a rough grassland could be phenotypically reminded of de Vries' mighty gray-white beard of the Alm-Öhi; The comparison with a geologist-artist like the holistic painting doctor and precise chronicler of rock sediments, Carl Gustav Carus, who, like de Vries, dissected landscape formations such as the basalt formations in Northern Ireland with an eye and a brush, seems more apt.But unlike Carus, de Vries is also a sculptor. For him, every object found in nature and pre-designed by it is a “sculpture trouvée” to which nothing needs to be added and which only needs to be arranged or contextualized. Such a minimally invasive concept also means that at times, as with Beuys, there is a risk of not being recognized - de Vries' wild, overgrown bush and grass jungle in the “Sanctuary” on the Pragsattel in Stuttgart was radically mowed and trimmed in 2018.that sometimes, as with Beuys, there is a risk of not being recognized - de Vries' wild, overgrown bush and grass jungle in the “Sanctuarium” on the Pragsattel in Stuttgart was radically mowed and trimmed in 2018.that sometimes, as with Beuys, there is a risk of not being recognized - de Vries' wild, overgrown bush and grass jungle in the “Sanctuarium” on the Pragsattel in Stuttgart was radically mowed and trimmed in 2018.
In addition to artistic "herbaria" outdoors and on paper and canvas in the tradition of the Renaissance Chambers of Wonder, artists 'books were also created with the entire cosmos of de Vries' in miniature. If one of these artist editions in the mimas atlas series is entitled “ambulo ergo sum”, that could also be the artist's motto in life: “I walk, therefore I am.”
That de Vries would have been forgotten by his own compatriots in his rustic German low mountain range is not the case: at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 he designed the Dutch pavilion and the lagoon island Lazzaretto Vecchio. Both came under the downright Buddhist title “To be all the ways to be”. He transformed the architecture into a meditation island in the eye of the Venetian artificial typhoon, leaving the real island to nature. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam also owns and honors his paintings by de Vries, since he and Armando and Henderikse formed the heart of Dutch Art Informel in the 1950s. Only last year the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin, which specializes in sculptures, dedicated a large exhibition to him with "How green is the grass?"which also included the latest work by the indefatigable ranger. May the grass and the sod beneath it rub off on his canvases, alive and fragrant, for today Herman de Vries is only eighty years old.