STUPID AS A PAINTER – Niek Hendrix

August 26 – September 16 2017

Today, we spend more and more time at the screens that frame our view of the world. We get bombarded by thousands of images, we have no choice but to deal with them in some way or another. How we look and understand images and their power structures could give us a more profound understanding of our world.

In the first instructional book on painting (De Pictura (1435) by Leon Battista Alberti), painters were instructed to consider the frame of the painting as a window. Through these singular frames, we received a view on our state of being, our history and thus our understanding of our world.

This perspectival paradigm continued to dominate through the ages of emerging technology as photography and cinema until the computer screen emerged. Now, multiple ‘windows’ coexist and overlap, the traditional singular perspective may have met its end and a new diverging mode appears.

By combining them with images from different sources through space and time, stripping the images to their bare essentials to shades between black and white a new perspective arises. When we read between the lines and generate a lateral way of thinking. It can give us a more profound understanding of our own state of being and each other.

Niek Hendrix lives and works in Maastricht (the Netherlands) and was a former resident of the Jan van Eyck Academy (2014-2015).
Winner 2017 of the Royal Dutch Painting Award. Winner 2013 of the Prix de Rome.
Aside from his practice as an artist he writes about contemporary art and is the founder of webzine Lost Painters.
In the past, he initiated the art initiative Park (Tilburg, Netherlands) and curated shows at different venues.