Nine Artists Respond to Climate Change
Artsy Editorial
18 parts, 36 x 26 cm each framed
Early in his career, painter herman de vries (who uses all lowercase letters as a symbol of his belief in equality) embraced randomness as an organizing principle. From 1961-66, he was a member of the Nul Group—a cohort of artists that included Henk Peeters, Jan Schoonhoven, and Armando—with whom he produced wall reliefs, large-scale installations, and happenings that explored principles such as repetition and the beauty of everyday objects and activities. Later on, de vries’s practice became quasi-scientific as he investigated plants with medicinal and hallucinogenic power. This led to such projects as the earth museum (1976), housed at the Museum Gassendi, Digne-les-Bains, which contains over 7,000 samples of earth that the artist gathered from all over the world. de vries keeps beautiful journals that include plant specimens, drawings, paintings, and notes.
Dutch, b. 1931, Alkmaar, Netherlands, based in Eschenau, Eckental, Germany