Peter Schenk

Peter Schenk was born in 1944 in Amersfoort. On his eighth birthday, his parents gave him a book on figure drawing. From that moment on, drawing became more important to him than homework. Through his drawings, he discovered that he functioned by thinking in images. This allowed him to better understand himself and the world around him.

When he was 19, he refused military service on grounds of conscientious objection. He fulfilled his alternative service as a nurse in a psychiatric ward in Eindhoven. During the long night shifts on the ward, Schenk began drawing portraits of sleeping patients. He always regarded these portraits of the patients—whom he came to consider his friends—as the dawn of his artistic consciousness and as the true beginning of his career as an artist.

At the academy in Amsterdam, Schenk worked primarily from observation. He was only satisfied once he had mastered this skill sufficiently. He always felt that nature had to be his teacher, after which he could break away from its perfection to reach the underlying reality of abstraction. During the first ten years of his career as an artist, Schenk still worked primarily from nature, but after 1979, in his studio in Amsterdam, he became increasingly absorbed in the working processes of abstract painting.

In recent years, he has developed a visual language in his paintings consisting of pod-like structures, imbued with a multifaceted and eloquent vocabulary. All of this is characteristic of a mature artist.