CO WESTERIK

The artist’s paintings are characterised by an existential interest in the trials and tribulations of human existence allied with a singular and cathartic exploration of the Dutch landscape. Westerik’s strangely captivating paintings achieve a fragile and quietly provocative balance that is unsettling. As the artist noted in 2014: the main aim of my work, its overriding compulsion, has been to create and unveil something that has never before seen the light of day. That is what has motivated me: a passion to reveal an underlying reality.

Westerik’s art is an intimate and unflinching testament to the multi-generational cycle of birth and death within his own family, through which he addressed universal human conditions. His figures draw upon the tradition of Northern European 19th Century Symbolism and early 20th Century Surrealism, which he stiffened with the allegorical directness and expressive ruggedness of the early Renaissance work of Andrea Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, and Matthias Grünewald.

His landscapes also present a regenerative fertility, where spirits of the deceased and of generations to come are both present in the low-lying polders and whispy clouds of The Netherlands. Oftentimes, the gentle undulations of a barren horizon line appear interchangeable with the outline of a human torso. In bringing together figure and landscape, Westerik abandoned classical perspective to juxtapose strangely cropped and impossibly enlarged fingers with menacingly large blades of grass, in desolate landscapes with jarring shifts in depth of field.

As a 16 year old, Westerik observed the carpet bombing of the City of Rotterdam by the German Luftwaffe in May 1940 and he subsequently endured the Nazi occupation of Holland. In 1942 he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and thereby avoided forced labour. A sense of unaddressed wartime history and rawness of withheld feelings is palpable in these works, particularly in his unyieldingly graphic flesh cuts, stitched wounds, and distraught fields.

Westerik refined his compositions through countless sketches, and his time-consuming layering of tempera and oil in semitransparent layers gives his paintings a particular lucidity; however, it yielded only a handful of paintings each year. His carefully annotated diaries make clear his studio toil, his critical analysis of his work, and the almost forensic way he approached the craft of painting.

Over the last 50 years, multiple retrospective exhibitions of Westerik’s work have been arranged by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; The Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, and the Groninger Museum; and each of these museums has sizeable collections of the artist’s work. A centennial exhibition of Westerik’s work was hosted by Sadie Coles gallery in London in 2024.