herman de vries represents the Netherlands at the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale, 2015.
herman de vries
to be all ways to be
Dutch Pavilion
Giardini, Venice
curators Colin Huizing and Cees de Boer
herman de vries considers himself invisible in his work: "I have nothing to say, it is already here". This was the case for his first collages and white monochrome works in the late 1950s, and for his wood reliefs and drawings and collages which he called ‘random objectivations’ in the 60s. And it remained so when he began to collect and present objects from nature around 1970. From 1990 he has demonstrated, through his "sanctuaries", how nature operates independently from man. Few artists have created a body of work that is so completely and consistently based on a few objective principles, while offering such tremendous visual variety. His work is found in numerous museum collections, and in recent years de vries has consistently been in the top 10 Dutch artists list compiled by Elsevier Magazine.