Hans van Horck

When Hans van Horck worked for a large printing company as a teenager, he developed an interest in print art. He proved to have a talent for designing posters. This led him to enroll in a program at the Academy of Industrial Design in Eindhoven.

To further develop his creativity, Hans moved to Switzerland at the age of eighteen. At that time, graphic and applied design were more advanced there than in the Netherlands, and this inspired Hans van Horck in his continued development as a contemporary artist.

He began his artistic career as a watercolorist, painting portraits and female nudes. His wife, Anita Duijf, often served as a model for his work. Over time, his work became increasingly abstract and expressive. He switched from watercolor to working with (acrylic) paint. He applies large amounts of paint to the canvas—sometimes very impasto, sometimes fluid—with a nod to his earlier watercolors. The canvases always lie flat while the artist is working on them. An added benefit is that he can walk around the canvas and continually assess the composition from all angles.

An adventure between abstraction and figuration.

What immediately strikes one about van Horck’s paintings? It is the endless depth of a color palette that resonates richly. Yet there is a pure connection between color and form in this body of work. It is indeed a dialogue between color and form, and one that occurs at a poetic frequency such that the points of contact between the two are recognizable in the realm of a refined fusion. The painter remains, in essence, a painter, so that the color palette retains a predominant role, and the human figure is incorporated into the opulence of refined tonalities, also serving as a framework upon which the overall image is based. Nowhere does van Horck assert form as a presence that is too independent, just as the color fields themselves are not independent parts of the painting, because everything is harmoniously and purely interwoven. For this artist, the color field remains a paradisiacal realm of hues and tones in which the subjects of humanity, myth, and nature are, as it were, brought to life beneath the surface of the paint. Thus, through refined allusions drawn from reality, a sense of alienation is suggested.