Andre Van Der Kerkhoff

by Ed McCormack

> Consider his latest conceit: a stamp album! Such is the audacity of Heinz Krautberger, an Austrian who has settled in Australia and reinvented himself as Andre van der Kerkhoff, a name that seems to have little to do with either his actual or adopted nationality.
> Sometimes I think van der Kerkhoff has to be the most subversive artist since Andy Warhol, with whom he shares a background in commercial art that gives him an edge when it comes to communicating subliminally. This is something I can state authoritatively, having known Andy and spent sufficient time at The Factory, at parties, in restaurants, watching him fuck with peoples’ heads. (I once saw a confirmed drag queen switch genders overnight because, at lunch in a health food place called Brownie’s, Andy made a casual remark: “Oh, Jackie, I think I liked you better as a boy .” But that’s another story.)
> Van der Kerkhoff I only met face to face once, a couple of years ago, at Jadite Galleries, in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. I seem to remember a little graying Max von Sydow beard and a grip –– perhaps the overcompensation of a European self-exiled to the land of Crocodile Dundee –– that made me remind myself never to shake hands with this dude again. But since he seemed otherwise personable, I chalked it off to an excess of social exuberance and turned my attention back to the work: nude images of comely young women he had photographed with black and white film then printed on large sheets of brushed aluminum. The areas that would normally register as white took on the silvery radiance of the bare aluminum, bringing the generous areas of naked flesh in his pictures peculiarly alive. But he tempered the innate eroticism of his imagery with flat areas of primary color that added an element of Mondrian-like austerity to his compositions, even when piquant touches of fire-engine red were used to fill in lips or nipples.
> What made this tension between hot and cool all the more intriguing was being hard put to decide whether van der Kerkhoff was redirecting the so-called “male gaze” toward higher planes of aesthetic contemplation, or simply providing us with a new pretext for looking at pictures of naked girls for the same reasons we have always looked at them.
> The fact that van der Kerkhoff’s femmes fatales are as iconic as they are titillating is just the beginning. His subversiveness goes way deeper in terms of how he blurs the line between photography and painting in a manner that, had he lived to see it, would probably have given poor old Clement Greenberg, the most curmudgeonly of formalist critics, heartburn. In his classic essay, “Towards a New Laocoon,” Greenberg wrote that “purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the limitations of the medium of the specific art.” But van der Kerkhoff, it would seem, accepts no limitations whatsoever. Certainly he is no purist when it comes to either photography or painting. In this sense, he is very much in tune with the postmodern eclecticism exemplified by the so-called “Pictures Generation” (Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, and Company), privileging pictorial content over the traditional values of the medium every time.
> And while the title “The Model as Muse” would seem even more apt for his nudes than for the current show about the cultural influence of couture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in a subsequent series of New York City street scenes van der Kerkhoff proved that he could also create compelling pictures in which everybody (with the exception of an intrepid flasher in one picture) keeps their clothes on. Shown last year at Artbreak Gallery in Brooklyn, these digitally enhanced photographs, also printed on brushed aluminum, are loving odes to a city that the artist once thought “symbolically reeked of a nation’s decay.”
> Although van der Kerkhoff claims that this Sodom on the Hudson later grew on him, resulting in 2500 images to print from following a three-day photographic orgy, one suspects that its New Hades aspects were what he still found most inspirational: the crumbling landmarks and broken iron security gates; the ironic graffiti; the visual cacophony and the lonely crowds; the discarded citizens slumbering on flattened cardboard boxes under the scornful gaze of million-eyed Moloch financial towers where future Bernie Madoffs were holed up plotting new crimes; the cracked, piss-smelling sidewalks; the face of the dead actor Heath Ledger in the evil clown make up of his last role as the Joker in “Batman,” dissolving into the darkly brooding toxic clouds like the Ghost of Gotham...
>
> Back in New York for the show at Artbreak, van der Kerkhoff stayed at the Carlton Arms Hotel, the city’s last outpost of hobohemia, now that the Hotel Chelsea has been commandeered by a new board of directors intent on turning out all its long-term artist residents like bedbugs and trading on its former legend to turn the place into a glitzy hostel for affluent wannabe hipsters. At the Carleton Arms, which still has the narrow halls and frayed charm of a Bowery flophouse (before the Bowery itself was gentrified) van der Kerkhoff found community and was prevailed upon by management to decorate one of the guest rooms with his imagery, joining the select group of international artists thus honored and gaining a permanent foothold in the city he has depicted so dynamically.
> Now, however, for his new show in his adopted city of Brisbane, some might think that van der Kerkhoff has gone too far. Is nothing sacred anymore? they might ask; has the man no scruples that he should see fit to impose his priapic vision on the scholarly field of philatelics? Is not even the humble stamp album, sacred refuge of innocent hobbyists and asexual nerds, safe from this incontinently imaginative image fiend?
> Apparently not, judging from the rich array of often surreal images he has come up with for his faux postage, such as a USA stamp bearing the profile of a hipster in shades who could appear to be nodding out after a fix in the manner of William Burroughs in the Beat Hotel, with “Ye Olde Carlton Arms Hotel” running up the left side, and, “If you after fun, join Club Med” emblazoned diagonally across the image, with the denomination “13 dimes” at the bottom. Another Carlton Arms Hotel stamp with an image that could suggest a black and white still from “Sid and Nancy” says, “Funk or Punk,” and has the disclaimer, “No substance has been taken during the taking of this image.”
> The texts that adorn postage stamps have obviously given van der Kerkhoff an opportunity to indulge and expand upon the conceptual wordplay that figured less prominently in some of his earlier work, particularly his street scenes, where the found phrases on billboards, the signs on store facades, and graffiti have commented wryly on the imagery, amounting to a kind of found poetry. Here, he goes all out with verbal free-association, as in another USA stamp showing a lithe young nude with a shaved pubis (but grown-up breasts to offset the Lolita effect) and lots of hair hanging in her face posing with outstretched arms as though for a crucifixion bearing the legend, “dervishingly fluent Isabelle.”
> Along with the unabashed Balthus-like voyeurism of a middle-aged man enthralled by youthful beauty, van der Kerkhoff also pays homage to some of his illustrious artistic predecessors in stamps such as one bearing a picture of a model in scanty lingerie that says, “Thinking of Schiele”; a Deutschland commemorative in which the face of Bertold Brecht –– adjusting his circular spectacles with a Freudian cigar in one horny paw and framed in a central rectangle that could be the window of a peepshow –– is surrounded by feminine imagery multiplied as in a hall of mirrors. And as if to make the point that something more than subtle and tender than brute Humbert Humbert lust is at play here, he also gives us a 30 centavos stamp for Chile juxtaposing a relatively chaste image of a blond beauty with that of the ultimate maestro of love poetry, Pablo Neruda, a wistful little smile on his lips, that trademark pancake cap plopped atop his portly pumpkin head like a fallen halo.
> This stamp, like Norman Mailer’s poignant title, “The Prisoner of Sex,” also suggests that the mature lover of youthful beauty can often be not so much an exploiter or an oppressor as simply a hapless, if happy, victim of what nature hath wrought –– a fact perhaps not as freely acknowledged as it should be in precincts of political correctness in relation to the heterosexual male, on whom it has become safe to blame all that is wrong with the world.
> That said, there are even stamps in this collection bearing no female imagery at all, most notably those of the artist’s adopted country Australia, in which the distinctive beehive-shaped mountains and rock formations of the indigenous western region known locally as “Bungle Bungles” figure prominently. Sometimes they tower over the metal carcasses of an automobile graveyard, perhaps suggesting how we sully even our rarest natural wonders with our ever growing junk heaps of consumer detritus. And on more than one Australian stamp, these topological oddities seem to be transformed into lungs by traceries of fine, vein-like lines, calling to mind Frederick Seidel’s poem “Climbing the Mountain,” about an aging man’s near-fatal attempt to keep up with the exertions of an athletic young woman in bed.
> Not that one could reasonably expect van der Kerkhoff to be familiar with the work of that excellent American poet, since most Americans certainly aren’t. However, both artists, in their different mediums, touch poignantly upon certain futilely romantic mature male aspirations that may be more or less universal.
> “When I started, I hadn’t the idea to conceive images in the form of stamps, that fact evolved organically in the past few weeks step by step,” the artist admitted to me in an e-mail some time back. Yet it was a brilliantly intuitive stroke, nonetheless, for Andre van der Kerkhoff to impose his private obsessions on formats normally reserved for governmental commerce and propaganda, turning actual nations into republics of dreams.
>
>
>
> Ed McCormack, a former columnist
> and feature writer for Rolling Stone,
> and one of the original contributing editors
> of Andy Warhol’s Interview, has written
> extensively on art and popular culture
> for the Village Voice and numerous other
> publications. Presently, with his wife
> Jeannie McCormack, he co-publishes
> the New York art journal Gallery & Studio.

JADITE GALLERIES
413 West 50th Street
New York, NY 10019
USA
ph. 212.315.2740

ARTBREAK GALLERY
160 East 25th Street
New York, NY 10010
USA
212-679-0680

SMART ART BASTARTZ
135A Queen Street
Cleveland, QLD. 4163
AUS
0416 281419

CARPORT CAFE GALLERY
3 Pickwick Street
Cannon Hill, QLD. 4170
AUS
07 3899 8414

FEBRUARY 09

'GOTHAM CITY BLUES' photographic exhibition at the ARTBREAK Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.

23rd of January - 20th of March, Artist in Residence, 'YE OLDE CARLTON ARMS HOTEL', Manhatten, NY.


MAY 09

'SYDNEY_NEW YORK AND_BACK' photographic exhibition with DAVID REX-LIVINGSTON ART DEALER, Sydney


OCTOBER 09

'LAST TANGO' photographic exhibition at JADITE GALLERIES, Manhatten, NY.

  One would think that the nude and near-nude photographic prints of knowingly wicked young woman, immortalized on large plates of  brushed aluminum, with which Andre van der Kerkhoff made his initial splash in the New York art world, would be a tough act to follow.  
   However, in ³New York Blues,² his new series of streetscapes in the same medium, this Austrian-born transplant to Australia demonstrates that it is his unique angle of vision, rather than a choice of pointedly provocative subject matter, that makes his post-Pop compositions so compelling.
  Interestingly enough, Kerkhoff claims that when he visited New York City for the first time in May of 2006, he thought of it as ³a place that symbolically reeked of a nation¹s decay.² Then, four months later, he returned to the city and experienced  a vibrant creative epiphany that he now describes as a ³love affair.² Still, there is no trace of wide-eyed tourist naiveté to be found in his pictures; rather, a sense of decay­­a residue of festering decadence, to be more precise­­ permeates the images he selected to print from among 2500 downloaded after a three day photographic rampage.    
   Times Square may have been ³Disneyfied,² as some New Yorkers (this one included) who preferred its earlier, sleazier incarnation are fond of complaining; but van der Kerkhoff obviously has an instinct for sniffing out its  underlying funk that seems all the more remarkable in a non-native. Indeed, his innate street-smarts are everywhere in evidence, enabling him not only to pick up on the jackhammer beat, the underlying rhythms, of what Norman Mailer once referred to as this ³insane, rapacious, avid, cancerous city,² but also to isolate telling details in its unrelenting visual cacophony.
   The atmosphere of impending apocalypse that has haunted Manhattan island since September 11, 2001 comes across especially spookily in ³Deja vu,² where a tiny jetliner, streaming over rooftops and a watertower, is juxtaposed with the sinisterly glowering faces of Leonardo De Capio, Matt Damon, and Jack Nicholson, looming on a huge billboard for  ³The Departed.² Down below, a somewhat smaller airline ad for travel between New York and London bears the slogan, ³CROSS THE POND WITHOUT GETTING SOAKED.²  
   In another print,³Missing in Action,² the streamlined span of the Brooklyn Bridge shoots like a silvery missile toward the broken skyline of Manhattan under dark clouds brightened here and there by the metallic surface of the brushed aluminum, which invariably substitutes for white in van der Kerkhoff¹s prints, heightening their otherworldly luminosity.
     The pregnant mood also extends to less overtly ominous images such as ³Passing By² and ³Canine Blues on Broadway,² where hurrying pedestrians or a woman walking a dog through a drizzle (both in absurdly matching raincoats! ) are dwarfed by gigantic billboard goddesses whose imperious poses seem to mock their smaller-than-life mortality. And in ³Scaffolded Icon,² the eternal precincts of art itself appear under symbolic assault by a scaffold superimposing the blown-up face of badgirl supermodel Kate Moss over the facade of the Guggenheim Museum­­ as if to suggest that mass media fame is the only remaining Immortality!
   Van der Kerkhoff possesses a special gift for evoking profound notions with casual snapshot immediacy, even while endowing his compositions with an immutable formal grace by virtue of his spare, flawless ³spotting² of brilliant primary colors, skillfully balanced with glowing areas of bare aluminum. Yet, he is not above making witty asides: In ³No McDonald in Sight,² he artfully savors the cruddy but newly chic facade of Yonah Shimmel Knish Bakery, which has survived since 1910 on the ground floor of a rotten-tooth tenement now bracketed between slicker structures on the recently gentrified Lower East Side. He also  takes wry notice of a much newer, more pretentious neighborhood establishment called Alias Restaurant, in another insightful print called ³In Need of Identity.²
  It would not be a stretch, prompted merely by the more overtly sexual imagery he has exhibited in the past, to say that Andre van der Kerkhoff eroticizes every subject he photographs and subsequently transforms in his peculiarly painterly prints on brushed aluminum. For van der Kerkhoff¹s eye is clearly an erogenous zone, as capable of imparting sensual qualities to pee-smelling streets, with their kinetic collage of lonely crowds and tattered semiotic wonders, as to the naked bodies of beautiful young women. Taken in these terms, his newest work represents a deepening of his exquisitely seductive vision.



Ed McCormack
New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice & the New York Daily News,
Editor & Founder of Gallery&Studio,
Contributing Editor of Andy Warhol's Interview,
New York City, 2008

 
   Although art historical convention compels us to classify them as ³nudes,² it would probably be more accurate to refer to Andre van der Kerkhoff¹s figures as ³naked.² There is an important distinction to be made here; for while the nude is an idealized and therefore depersonalized artistic construct, nakedness implies the baring of a particular body possessed of individual identity.
    One might logically expect this differentiation to please the gatekeepers of political correctness. Yet  they who most vociferously deplore the identity-blurring objectification of the so-called ³Male Gaze² are often those who holler loudest  when any male artist dares to depart from the hourglass stereotype of ³Ideal Form,² generally demure of pose and devoid of pubic hair.
  So how they will react as van der Kerkhoff¹s renown grows, as it most certainly will given the recognition and the number of exhibitions his talent has already begun to garner him, remains to be seen. (Consider the scandal when his worthy modernist predecessors Amedeo Modigliani and Egon Schiele first substituted nakedness for nudity, then multiply that by the many times more touchy cultural climate of our present postmodern era).
    Clearly, the aerobically athleticized  young women that van der Kerkhoff chooses to depict in his photo-derived prints on brushed aluminum belong to a bold new species of contemporary beauty, as they proudly display their nubile charms in a manner that makes a mockery of old-fashioned modesty. Look how frankly that angular waif with the tousled blond tresses spilling down around her pert breasts gazes out at the viewer from under quizzical Brooke Shields eyebrows; how that somewhat more curvaceous model preens her silvery nakedness like a living arabesque, set against  vibrant hard-edged color areas reminiscent of Mondrian; how yet another lithe sylph stretches her slender arms high above her head with drowsy feline grace before a red-framed window in which gray dawn breaks over a phallic bouquet of sun-splashed skyscraper-spires.
    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. 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 aluminum surfaces onto which he prints his icons of unabashed desire.
   Indeed  such series titles as ³The Seduction of Citizen K² and ³Citizen K¹s Seductive Blues² reveal a candidness akin to Norman Mailer¹s self-characterization as ³The Prisoner of Sex.² At the same time, van der Kerkhoff takes care to invest his compositions with  formal qualities as engaging as the physical attributes of his subjects, achieving, as I once noted  in another context, a tantalizing tension between the hot and the cool, the blatantly erotic and the purely aesthetic.    
   To the active imagination, each of Andre van der Kerkhoff¹s prints can suggest a narrative subtext: One composition may evoke a poetic California dreamer, perhaps a fledgling folk singer fresh from the hot tub; another, a promising student moonlighting at an escort service to pay her way through medical school; yet another, an elegant agent for high-end Manhattan real estate, just before dressing for success.
   Every picture seems to celebrate  the complexity of the contemporary young woman, whose take on feminism is more likely modeled on the self-empowerment of Oprah and Madonna than the strident rhetoric of Kate Millett or Germaine Greer. In any case, she almost certainly sees her beauty as a facet of that empowerment, rather than a detriment to being taken seriously. Andre van der Kerkhoff appears to take her very seriously indeed, bathing her nakedness in a light that signifies one man¹s vision of the sacred.
*      *      *


Ed McCormack, one of the original contributing
editors of Andy Warhol¹s Interview,
has written extensively on art and popular culture for
Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, the New York Daily News,
New York Times and  numerous other publications.
At present, with his wife Jeannie McCormack, he publishes the
art journal Gallery&Studio.
Most recently he wrote a catalog essay for the exhibition
³Willem de Kooning, 1981-1986,² at L&M Arts, New York City.






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.

What makes an artist known for one type of work in one medium suddenly embark on a new mode of expression in an entirely different medium is one of the great mysteries of the creative personality.
" I had not picked up a camera in thirty years before I began this series," the self taught artist Andre van der Kerkhoff, born in Austria and presently a resident of Australia, said of his exhibition " The Seduction of Citizen K," seen recently at Jadite Galleries, 413 West 50th Street, New York.
Since he was previously known for his Australian landscapes, this series of photo-derived female nudes printed on brushed aluminum represents a significant departure for the van der Kerkhoff, who has exhibited widely throughout France, Australia, Canada, and the United States.
" I wanted to explore for the first time the human figure and embrace the new possibilities of digital media," the artist stated of his erotically charged yet formally cool images of comely young models striking seductive poses, set against bare aluminum accented with color areas of an almost Mondrian-like austerity.
Exhibited unframed on the gallery walls, they have a sense of "objectness" that traverses the boundaries between two dimensional representation and sculpture. But it is the tantalizing tension between hot and cool, eroticism and formalism, that lends these works an appeal akin to the deadpan portraiture of Andy Warhol and the "Great American Nudes" series of Tom Wesselmann.
However, van der Kerkhoff approaches his nudes without Pop irony. That their poses are as overt as those in some of the more explicit men's magazines does not suggest a parody or a moral judgment so much as a direct expression of our changing sexual mores. The models are obviously comfortable vamping for the camera and the artist feels no need to depersonalize them, as Wesselmann did when he made his figures increasingly more anonymous.
Rather, he preserves the individuality of his models, even while making the spaces and shapes around them as important a part of each composition as the figures themselves. Indeed, it is the contours of the figures that create these spaces and bring them alive, so that even the empty spaces are permeated by their presence and enlivened as if by a lingering trace of perfume. Even in "Nude XXI", where most of the details vanish into the silvery surface of the aluminum, the figure is brought to life by the geometric forms around it; the placement of one filled-in nipple, like a tiny blue square in a geometric composition by Mondrian, becomes the focal point around which the rest of the figure materializes in the viewer's imagination.
In other works, art historical references are suggested by such details as the naturally elongated torso of the model reclining on her back in "Nude VIII", which recalls the slenderly graceful figures of Modigliani. And even in those works, such as "Nude XII" , where the model's voluptuousness is palpably present and her pose is most explicitly alluring, it is much to Andre van der Kerkhoff's credit that, through the skillful spotting of color areas, he imparts to his compositions a sense of abstraction that makes their purely aesthetic qualities at least as engrossing as the physical attributes of his subjects.
----- Ed McCormack -----

Austrian born artist Andre van der Kerkhoff likes to refer to Franz Grillparzer when asked about the inspiration or geneses to his current range of works ‘Beware of Silence.’

The phrase that Andre quotes is ‘The road of modern culture leads from humanitarianism via nationalism to bestiality.’ Tough stuff; not for the fainthearted and neither is Andre’s new exhibition.

Paintings that depict stark images of the Twin Towers against a background of the American flag, or a phallus pinned to the church with hovering cherub, and carefully executed global brand icons presented in road sign satire are inevitably destined to provoke and outrage.

To say that the artist doesn’t care whether people find the works confrontational or shocking and distasteful is not true, he says. “My paintings aren’t the gospel; they are just images whose purpose isn’t to preach righteousness, but to spark a discussion between politically antipodean perspectives to the recent and past events in politics and society.”

‘Beware of Silence’ may have had its catalyst in the events of September 11, but it is crucial to make the point that this catastrophe was only a catalyst. Andre’s range of subject matter is both contemporary and historical and is borne of the man himself, his cultural heritage, his European political and social intensity and then the transition to the New World.

Trite as it seems, it’s imperative to look at the environment this artist has emerged from, to gain an appreciation of the man and his work. And trite as it also seems – this artist has an integrity and intensity, which we usually see only in youth and their zealous life-unsullied aspirations. He could be called naïve, but he wouldn’t care and would argue that if passion and holding true to belief is to be naïve, then his exhibition and its controversy has total vindication.

Andre is reclusive. There is little obvious drama or prima donna to the man. An Austrian, born in Graz in 1956 with a grandfather who served in the SS, Andre immigrated first to France in 1978. There he lived in Toulouse working as a graphic artist, set designer and began his fine art career.

In 1986 he immigrated to Australia. As with so many émigrés to the New World, Andre found himself forced to take a much more entrepreneurial approach to employment and after some interesting but short lived ventures, found success in creating bonsais.

He didn’t paint for nearly 10 years after arriving in Australia, resuming in 1995. His early exhibitions in Australia have strong influences from his graphic and set design days. There is a static, controlled, overly precise quality, an Austrian’ quality perhaps, but much more palatable to the general viewer though. This was his calm before the storm.

In the last two years, particularly the exhibition of 2001 titled ‘From Above and Below’ a wildness and discombobulating sense had well and truly its way from his heart to the canvass.

‘From Above and Below’ was dark, brooding, intense with disconcerting perspectives. Most viewers thought the works were complete abstracts and of a science fiction genre. A complete misread, although perhaps a little understandable. The title gave a clue to the subject matter – a series of curious landscapes with dreamlike curling tree stands. This exhibition is a significant precursor to the current series.

Interestingly, as Andre has developed the current series, a softening emerges. Not in the subject matter, which moves from September 11 to Racism to Banality of society and Global brand aggrandizement; the Jewish tragedy and sexual molestation within the churches, - but in treatment.

Colours become in some almost luminous with pastels, a new dexterity, lightness and paradoxical and allegorical approach emerges. The obvious and most contemporary subjects are the first paintings. Andre agrees that these were easier to execute, as the violence of the events demands an equally explosive and immediate response.

He works in mixed media, with a lot of oil stick and pastels. Andre’s works have always glistened with influence of his graphic design training, demonstrable in precision, lightness of texture, and perspective distortion.

‘Since September 11 my focus towards the arts as a professional vehicle to produce pretty petty pictures for petty pretty walls has changed into a wish to communicate with my audience a slightly different perspective to the media’s propagandized truth’ is how Andre summarizes his work and philosophy.

It’s a dangerous approach – a mid life enfant terrible at his best and worst? Fortunately for the artist and us, it works. The works are not only highly competent they are deeply allegorical, and cleverly executed.

Then there is the guilt of Andre and his familial ‘Culture Cringe’ of being an Austrian with a grandfather in the SS. Is this Andre’s own attempt at atonement for the collective sins of his fathers? He doesn’t argue the point and he goes further by laying claim to the rare altruism of intent.

The exhibition is titled ‘Beware of Silence’ but in fact, most of the paintings are filled with screaming words. Not immediately apparent and requiring close examination. The artist has extended this play of silence by linking the exhibition with thoughtful homilies between the works. Most of course are damning commentaries: ‘When Priests without fearing God’s Wrath abuse innocence for their earthly lust, Christianity lies naked of all divinity.’

The question left perhaps is this: ‘Beware of Silence’ a middle aged European’s personal rant against the evils and inexactitudes of life through his chosen artistic medium? A somewhat tired and 70’s Andy Warhol set up, if so. Or, is Andre van der Kerkhoff holding true to the precepts of the medieval and reformation heretics? Misguided, misunderstood, but brilliant and valid?

Fragmented Thoughts at Random

by Andre van der Kerkhoff


The greatness of a nation doesn't rise from fleeting sporting glories, but by it's ability to recognize past wrongs.


Righteousness used for propaganda becomes a dangerous tool and should be condemned regardless of who uses it for their cause.


I say it is time to expand the Ten Commandments to eleven and proclaim:
"Thou shall not rape my children."


You can build walls as high as your guilt, but their height can't protect you from your shame.


Who would have thought that the colonisers would become the colonised?


Isn't it easy to use evil to incite the passions of our righteousness, especially if it is committed by others and not us.


I say to those who choose silence over condemnation when faced by evil, that no Hail Mary may absolve you of your complicity.


Leaders who can't show mercy towards the condemned shouldn't lead nations, as their lack of compassion might lead to inhumanity.


Just plough Jerusalem beneath its blood soaked soil and from its field's peace may grow.


Walls conceived to divide people from each other are never lasting monuments to man's bigotry.


The human experience should classify " God bless America. " as an irony.


How can we expect equality, when every social doctrine points towards the glory of being first?


The status quo of today will be the upheaval of tomorrow.


Oligarchy awaits man of no convictions.


I say to those who place profit before the common good, that the pro-clamation, “let them eat cake”, cost Marie Antoinette her noble head.


Men without rudder will annihilate empires.


Show me a man who says that he never had a racist thought in his life and I’ll show you a liar.


In the age of virtuality, gadgets replace spirituality.


In today’s ambiguity the truth is bilingual.


Man carries the ill of racism as stigma to his intelligence.


The Jewish tragedy is simply a paradox between faith and reality.


Man's possibilities lie between E = m square and the furnaces of Auschwitz.


Only mediocre men have to hide behind ideologies, strong men create their own.


Sadly most men choose trivia over substance.


Man is not good nor evil but fallible.


Instead of wisdom and knowledge man directs television to numb the people into social impotence.


Only a fool might value progress when comparing the thoughts of Voltaire with those of Jerry Springer.


Man’s curse of good and evil lies simply in his ability to conceive and believe in an abstract thought.


If God is worth dying for, life must have been on sale.


Man’s demise will originate within his vainglory.


Where everything has a beginning and an end, endless is as abstract as silence in an ever-reverberating universe.


Sex is the Alpha and the Omega of Life.


One’s self is encased by the nutshell of ones ego.


Intimacy comes only after ones complete self-surrender.


I can’t help but think that, if there were a God, he must be an anti-Semite.


Wrong is wrong is wrong, whoever the perpetrator.


When it comes to persistence and self-belief Semites are the champions.


Self-importance and bigotry are elementary to tyranny.


Those who believe that they are the chosen one’s have been chosen more often then they would wish to care.


An assassination is a coward’s way to have the last word.


I wish the Jewish intelligentsia wouldn't brand every non-Jewish criticism with an anti-Semitic label.


To kill to kill to kill is always murder.


Suicide bombers are victims of three enemies.


Who can claim innocence, when confronted by history?


How long can the perpetuity of one generation stealing from the next, last?


The cruelty lies in planet Earth’s inability to accommodate six billion educated spirits.


It’s paradoxical that education is a link in man's dissatisfaction.


Education frees man from slavery, but shackles him to money.


Only visionaries can see beyond their own field of vision and expand our horizon.


Only those stricken with despair may see patience as a virtue.


Art is an anthropological essay to solve the reason for being.


Art can be a line from A to B, but also just a single dot.


Life itself is art - the art to exist against all odds.


In mans’ indifference towards his fellow beings lies the essence of inhumanity.


Only man could have come up with an idea as bizarre as money.


A man of virtue must find society alien.


In almost all of us a tyrant lies dormant, waiting for his cue.


Tyranny is a virus for which only time stands as a cure.


Sport is mock war.


Sport and Art: While sport seeks to be the potassium bromide for the proletariat, art aims relentlessly for revolution.


It is difficult to find an original thought in the shadows of Shakespeare and Aristotle.


“There can't be silence after a Big Bang”.


It's ironic that the church condemns abortion, yet blesses soldiers for the slaughter.


The seed for greed grows deep in our need to heed to our ego.


Shopping trolleys are the hyenas of greed.


Life’s road isn't straight and narrow, but ever changing.


Christianity has to carry the burden of the Holocaust.


The silence of churches stoked the furnaces of inhumanity.


Freedom that has been built on slavery can only be American.


The land of the free is only anyone’s savior, if one is part of its ego.


Isn't it a paradox that those who want to sit in judgment over others don’t want to be judged?


Nuremberg was just, but with every new burning cross it’s validity became an American satire.


Man’s patience can end in volatility.


Maybe the passion in enlisting men would be less exuberant, if they would possess the wisdom, which they will have acquired by armistice.


Love can only be seen when lost or found in tears.


Australia has fought in so many unnecessary wars, yet it hasn't yet fought it’s most important of all – “The war of independence”.


The scarcity of white Australian history is the Freudian umbilical cord to Mother England.


When priests abuse innocence without fearing God’s wrath for their earthly lust, Christianity lies naked of all divinity.


I never forgave Mao Tse-Tung for his recognition of Pinochet’s Chile – It stunk of Guano.


Guano opened my political eyes - I just saw shit.


In politics shit has always taken precedence over doctrinal integrity.


The Right wouldn't mind Pinochetorial insights - Refugees might vanish forever-ever in never-never.


As long as the chosen one's don’t choose to break the bread in half, their history will always be written in blood.


The theological dignity of difference is to anyone who died on a religious battlefield an oxymoron.


Soon the unjust deeds of Israel will expunge the guilt of the Holocaust.


Like the Roman Empire the Western World will be swallowed up by much hungrier nations.


Only if we are prepared to sacrifice half of our wealth to feed those who see our world as their salvation might we be able to hold onto our land.


Remember always that the face of a refugee could be one day yours.


Why do we judge life's success by its worldly wealth and not it’s spiritual one.


Generosity is only genuine, if it can’t be tax deducted.


We only need God, because we can’t grasp the meaning of nothing.


If the human spirit could rationalize endless into mathematics, God might stand after the equation.


I say - capitalism is dead - long live the mutual fundism.


The political fabric of the Western World is turning beige and heading towards black and brown.


Most wars are wars about righteousness, but only a very few are right.


As human beings we all share the same needs, fears and ambitions, yet we harbor racism in our souls.


Out for food, love and shelter, man created a world in excess.


Crossroads are choices that may lead to opposed realities.


Mans’ belief in his singular importance creates the being nature has to fear.


God have mercy on an educated man, as he just has complicated the essence of life.


What a pity that the aged mind hasn’t a body of youth as a vessel - then maybe that is nature’s way to ensure revolution within evolution.


Why do prophets need miracles for their justification of being?


An atheist’s worst nightmare consists of being shipwrecked on a deserted island with an ultra orthodox existentialist.


Today our dreams evolve around share portfolios and red Ferraris, yester-day we dreamed of liberty and democracy, whilst our prehistoric ancestor wished just for the mammoth to appear, just what will our great grand-children dream of - A blue planet?


Half an education is worse than no education at all.


The inhospitability of other worlds should be man’s dogma for the preser-vation of his remaining Eden.


Between parasitic liberalism and parasitic socialism one’s choice is grim.


War is conceived by few, but endured by many.


How satisfying life could be, if man’s daily search for utopia could be replaced by just a kind thought.


If the Jewish psyche believes that it’s identity lies in the ashes of Auschwitz, then the nation of Israel will always be a nation of victims.


What will happen to the want society, when there is nothing more to be had?


Further the bourgeoisie leans towards an “Us and Them", closer my affinity lies with the underdog.


Fragmentation of substance can lead to trivia in choice.


Love and expertise are inherent to cure.


If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.


A friend is as rare as two pearls in one oyster.


Beware of friendship that is generic.


I am afraid for the future, because yesterday and today are the yardsticks by which we will live tomorrow.


Maybe America's obsession with youth lies in it’s still historic adolescence.


Knowledge is the E - m square of man’s curiosity.


Man's ultimate aim for knowledge is God.


Knowledge is like a Russian doll only without it’s outer coat.


The citizen’s opinion is mostly composed of envy and fear.


Present handshakes have depreciated from their past value.


Only the dead are delivered from prejudice.


Prejudice cloaks humanity’s potential.


Skepticism of men without opinion unleashes bigotry.


Memory and hope seem best - reality worst.


Prophets predict changes; Messiahs revolutionize doctrines.


Good and Evil are inherent notions of the human intellect, and only life and genetics will determine which of the two might dominate the existence.


Good and Evil are perplex anthropological concepts; in as much as their in-terpretation varies by and large on societal values whose moral perimeters might be sins apart.


In the age of exploitation philanthropy seems less and less genuine, especially if the motivation of the philanthropist lies in his self-promotion.


It’s a pity that religion got hold of God.


The Big Bang is our birth, therefore the uterus belongs to God, and God is female.


God is man’s bath plug of angst.


Religion and sexuality are the oil and water of morality.


Greater man’s knowledge, abstracter his belief.


Churches are poison to faith.


The seeds of carnal lust flourish in man’s moral pretence.


Priests are only men and men are capable of anything.


I say to anybody who witnesses evil, that to look away is as repulsive as the deed itself.


I believe in nothing, because everything is just temporary.


Man's history is simply the continuous repetition of past wrongs.


Those who possess power have an exclusive truth over the weak.


When historians exchange invasion for settlement, then the truth has become bilingual.


When politicians explain genocide as evolution, then the truth is being raped.


Truth is only pure, if on the other side of the equation no gain can be found.


Society would fail itself, if it did not question, from time to time, it's leaders' right to lead.


Love lies somewhere in between sex and chocolate.


Commitment can only be true, if it is free.


Man has a gift to transform necessities into nuisances.


Death is just a point where the individual's time ceases.


It’s surreal that man near death has no fear of him, yet fears him to death a whole lifetime away.


Love and death are life’s certainties without a date.


Death is the collision of two realities.


The indifference of the bourgeoisie is politics' fundament.


Man's indifference to the consequences of his actions makes him a pest of nature.


The statue of liberty is pure irony in the face of colored people.


Death is equal to all.


Money is an existential pestilence.


Only a few men have the strength to do without the lure of money.


Money is absurd, as it’s value depends entirely on abstract notions of validity.


A paper note’s value is more abstract than those of a silver coin but the same amount becomes faith when virtual in cyber space.


Only arrogance could have invented money.


Man is perfectly happy to exchange evil for monetary gain.


Money and Evil are intricately tied together, inseparable as Gordius’ knot.


The paradoxical and tragic reality of man is that he only perceives value in things, which are exchangeable for money and he might end up with nothing but an empty world.


Instead of having made the world go round, money will sell it out.


Love is real, when time hasn't ravaged the beauty of your lover in your eyes.


Man just does, without reflecting on tomorrow.


Man’s motto: Now is important – tomorrow might not be.


Man tries to live life as if it was an all you can eat smorgasbord.


Mankind’s indigestion is just around the corner.


Love might be a fleeting thought that you caught in mid air and treasured to this day.


Love can be the feeling of your loins in between innocent gazes.


The experience of Communism throughout the 20th century was nothing more than the brutal rape of an idealistic idea.


From a Darwinian point of view, an egalitarian society would represent a far greater evolutionary leap away from its hierarchical ancestral existence, than any society based on class.


Social Marxism might work in a society in which money and power are non-entities.


It is quite a paradox that Christianity and Socialism have never found a common denominator, although Christ had been the worlds first re-corded socialist.


Man’s psychological characteristics are antipodal opposed to the concept of egalitarianism: man wants more and not less, and certainly he doesn't want to share.


Sadly the principles of Communism will always be correlated to the failed Soviet-Chinese experiments of Gulagian oppression and arduous Cultural Revolution.


Don’t put ideals into human hands, as they will soon tarnish to misery.


Every human has ideals, but only very few are able to experience them as a reality.


Ideals are youth's manna; age survives on pragmatism.


Only a dead idealist can’t betray his ideals.


To be an idealist one has to be first a romantic.


Text messages might rebirth romanticism into cool cyber sentimentalism.


Woomera stands as testimony to our societal egoism and callous political expediency: Shame Australia Fair.


For the youth of today, I fear for tomorrow, as we weren't too exemplifying.


Perceived societal changes are just oscillating facts of expedient political correctness.


In language there isn't a singularity of meaning and one's precision of intent depends solely on one's experience in common.


Youth is life's orgy before taking stock.


While youth flouts its age, age cherishes its memory.


Every stage of life is singular and without return.


I can't imagine life without solitude; it vivifies my imagination.


Solitude by choice is liberating, but a gulag when imposed.


No solitude can be shared.


The present rarely lasts longer than a heartbeat.


To procrastinate is a man's way to enjoy yesterday.


Love can be as simple as a grain of sand or complicated as Ibsen.


Love is the taste of one's lover's lips.


Politics is the art of trickery.


The more I understand man, the more I wish to be alone.


In the age of greed man’s integrity becomes endangered.


God erred by giving Earth to man; Mars would have been a better choice.