Herman de Vries

Herman de Vries (born 11 July 1931 in Alkmaar) is a Dutch artist. He typically stylises his name in lower-case as herman de vries on his artwork ‘to avoid hierarchy’. De Vries works and lives with his wife Susanne in Eschenau near Knetzgau, Germany.

herman de vries from the 1954 started working with mobiles, collage, and monochrome. From the time of his early involvement in the international movement ZERO, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, de vries has always pursued the idea of simplicity and economy in his expressive, compositional, and working methods, in an attempt to recreate the basic mechanisms of life within the artistic process.

Over the decades, his oeuvre has shown an extraordinarily rich penchant for invention and for experimentation with different materials and languages; art, science and philosophy are constantly interwoven and tied to the world around us.

His art, without figuration or colour, is defined by himself as ‘informal’. In the mid-1970s, de vries began to concentrate on natural materials, processes and phenomena, presenting them as primary physical realities of human existence.

Ever since, he has collected, arranged, singled out and displayed fragments of nature and culture, calling attention to both the oneness and the diversity of the world around us. Currently, his art focuses on the disrupted relation between humanity and nature.

His works can be found in the collections of museums around the world, and in 2014 and 2015 were featured in the exhibitions on ZERO at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He represented the Netherlands at the International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2015, where his project in the national pavilion and on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio drew unanimous praise from critics and visitors.