Andre Van Der Kerkhoff

Metallic Edge arts with Phil Brown






After he swapped paint for a lens, artist Andre van der Kerkhoff
found that aluminium was the perfect foil for his art.

Pressure to impress New York art lovers convinced Brisbane artist Andre van der Kerkhoff to change tack. The artist is known and respected for his landscapes, and there had been interest when his work was exhibited in Europe and the US.

But collectors in the Big Apple are hard to please, and when Andre’s New York art dealer asked him to do something New Yorkers might relate to more, he was temporarily stumped. Not for long though, because Andre rose to the challenge and came up with a new genre.

The 51-year-old painter picked up a camera and started shooting. The result can be seen in his latest exhibition, Citizen K’s Seductive Blues, now at Baguette Gallery, Ascot. These limited edition prints enshrine painterly virtues but use new media to great effect.

“I hadn’t used a camera in 30 years before I began this series,” he says. “When I went out shooting some photos in New York, I ended up taking 2500 images, and when 1500 of them were good, I knew I was on to something.”

Back in Brisbane, a friend had wanted to pose for some nude studies so Andre decided to take her up on the offer and started shooting nudes.

“When I saw these images on the computer, I immediately thought they would look good on metal,” he says. “I thought stainless steel might work but ended up with brushed aluminium.”

Once the works were digitally manipulated and printed on thin metallic sheets, he realised the technique was ideal for his new vision. The marriage of mediums works brilliantly and gives the artworks a contemporary edginess that was missing from his landscapes.

In the words of New York art critic Ed McCormack, the new works are “erotically charged yet formally cool images of comely young models striking seductive poses, set against bare aluminium accented with colour areas of an almost Mondrian-like austerity”.

The works are also reminiscent of Edvard Munch, particularly Munch’s Madonna, and those of some late 20th century artists such as Andy Warhol. This seems appropriate considering the New York connection, although Ed McCormack says there are differences.

“Unlike his Pop predecessors, van der Kerkhoff does not appropriate images from the mass media in order to distance them as banal objects of satire or deny their honest erotic power in the manner of those Victorian hypocrites who banished every unclothed figure to a sterile limbo of myth to placate the clergy,” McCormack writes.

“Rather, he photographs the models himself, directing them with the discerning eye of a fine artist and evincing a reverence that is reflected as viscerally as a shudder in the shimmering aluminium surfaces on to which he prints his icons of unabashed desire.”

It’s New York that inspired this new strand of Andre’s work, and that city sometimes features as the backdrop. He’s selling well there.

Being a landscape painter, Andre can’t help setting his nudes against his local cityscape. Old Queenslanders, the river and the CBD’s high-rises can be glimpsed beyond the central figures, who luxuriate in their own nakedness.

The images seem to shimmer, and the aluminium surface gives them a surprising immediacy. “This is just the beginning,” he promises. And it’s a very good place to start.