Niek Hendrix
None, NL, 1985 Works and lives in Rotterdam
Niek Hendrix studied at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. His work has featured in various collections and he was awarded the Koninklijke Prijs voor de Schilderkunst (Dutch Royal Award for Painting).
Niek Hendrix (born 1985) gathers together large numbers of paintings to form a temporary group. Like a modern-day alchemist, he combines various ingredients that stimulate human curiosity and form an image bank that includes references to space travel, scientific research, biology, art, and art history to create new contexts, storylines and visual rhyme.
He created these works on panels, almost entirely in black and white, taking the utmost care and using a highly sophisticated oil painting technique, thus bringing together a group of borrowed images, both contemporary and historical. His work creates references to the human desire to explore the world around us. Copying an image is a kind of conjuring trick, which feeds our will to understand it. He poses questions about the meaning of originality and how, as an artist, one can relate to history. The viewer is forced to take a stance between the here and now, and the history of image.