Bart Drost

Bart Drost lives and works in Nijmegen.

Bart Drost’s work is cheerful. Vibrant colors, no blending, clear—sometimes black—outlines, and playful depictions. He varies his materials widely. Linen and paint, cut-out flat wood, carpet, glass, and bitumen paper each reveal color and theme in entirely different ways. Moreover, Drost sometimes transitions from one material to another; he gives a drawing on bitumen paper a quasi-spatial effect by repeating the motif in a cut-out form. This is most evident in a drawing of an old-fashioned, pot-bellied tall coffee pot, whose spout begins at the widest part of the belly. Coffee is being poured from the pot into a cup on a small table. On paper, this is a drawn, framed depiction of a small table, a saucer, and a cup, along with a pot from which a stream flows into the cup. The background within the drawn frame is a solid color. The same scene, cut out of a flat piece of wood, produces a highly alienating effect: a small table on a single leg with a round top, a cup on it, into which a stream flows from the pot. Each background is merely the one that happens to be in front of the work. The colors are the same as those of the stream of coffee flowing into the cup. When executed at actual size, this creates a bizarre effect.

Bart Drost regularly switches between forms and materials. He works with and without “primitive” perspective. Everything consists of an interplay of planes, in which at most a few black or dark lines clarify the image. The colors are uniform and bright within each plane, but not always cheerful. The themes of his work are usually animals or objects that interest children, while a little boy is the most frequent recurring figure.