Berend Strik

Born 1960, the Netherlands. Lives and works in Amsterdam.

Berend Strik examines the meaning of images. He subjects his photographs to an intensive process of reworking with fabric and thread, emphasizing what strikes him as most significant, partly covering the image, opening it elsewhere. The stitched photographs slow down our view and thereby intensify both image and content. Each intervention adds a layer of meaning and, paradoxically, grants access to the photograph rather than obscuring it.

A dialogue between detachment and personal involvement runs through the work. The intimate, time-consuming act of stitching stands in deliberate contrast to the photograph as product of the camera’s mechanical instant. Yet however far the reworking goes, the image stays close to reality, so that the viewer’s connection to it remains intact. “The photos allude to moments that are forever gone,” Strik says. “The stitching connects the immaterial with the material world.”

His thinking was marked early on by the first films he saw as a child, in 1973: Bruce Lee, who united martial arts, acting, teaching and philosophy in a single persona. Lee’s principle “be water”, capable of taking on any form, remains, for Strik, as much a working method as a philosophy. Beneath it all run three questions: How do I relate to life? What role am I striving for within contemporary visual art? How do I relate to art history?

Strik’s works are held in the collections of major Dutch museums, among them the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, as well as in international collections.

2018
Artist in residence, Livingstone Projects, Berlin, DE

2013
Artist in residence, Cemeti, Yogyakarta, ID

2011
Artist in residence, WOW, Architecture Woodfactory, Beijing, CH

2001
Artist in residence, Het Vijfde Seizoen, Den Dolder, NL

1998-2000
ISCP, New York, USA

1986-1988
Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, NL

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