Paul Louis Van Den Bergh

Paul Louis van den Bergh

AWARDS
1994 First Prize Arts Section,The New Zealand Wearable Arts Awards. Finalist New Zealand Wearable Arts Awards Grand Prize, Nelson,NZ.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1996 Solo Exhibition,Moray Gallery,Dunedin,NZ.
1997 Solo Exhibition,Artworks Gallery,Wanaka,NZ.
2002 Invitation to give lecture and exhibit at the 2nd International
Biennial of Art,Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA),Buenos Aires,Argentina.

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
1995 Dip.Fine Arts Graduates Exhibition,
The Forrester Gallery,Oamaru,NZ
2000 Group Exhibition,"New Works",CoCA Gallery,
Christchurch,NZ.
2001 CoCA Awards,CoCA Gallery,Christchurch,NZ.
2001 Group Exhibition,"Less Is More,More Or Less",CoCA
Gallery,Christchurch,NZ.
2002 Group Exhibition,"I Will Need Words",CoCA
Gallery,Christchurch,NZ.
2002 CoCA Awards,CoCA Gallery,Christchurch,NZ.
2002 "Less is More,More or Less",CoCA Gallery,Christchurch,NZ.
2003 "Accord",with Margriet Windhausen and Paul van den Bergh,SOCA Gallery,Auckland,NZ.
2005 "ACTIVATE Contemporary Artists",CoCA Gallery,Christchurch.
2005 "GENERATIONS-The Windhausens and the van den Berghs",CoCA Gallery,Christchurch.
2006 "GENERATIONS-The Windhausens and the van den Berghs",Aigantighe Art Gallery,Timaru,NZ.
2007 "Exhibition/auction at Watson's Fine Art Auction,Christchurch.

COLLECTIONS
In public and private collections in England,USA,The Netherlands,Australia,New Zealand.

EDUCATION
1993-1995 DFA,Otago Polytechnic School of Fine Arts.

Dutch treat

by Andrew Paul Wood
In Timaru for the festive season I happened to pop into the Aigantighe Art Gallery and was rather taken with their exhibition Generations.

In Timaru for the festive season I happened to pop into the Aigantighe Art Gallery and was rather taken with their exhibition Generations. This was for two reasons: first, two of the people involved valiantly tried to make an artist of me in my adolescence and second, there is something very intriguing in an exhibition about multiple generations of artists in two Dutch émigrée families joined by marriage: the Windhausens and the Van den Berghs.

The Windhausens originated in Wald-niel, a German village near the Dutch border. In the beginning there was Peter Heinrich Windhausen (1832-1903) who was quite a well-known Roermond-based portraitist. His sons Albin (1863-1946) and Paul (1871-1944) established a studio in Roermond specialising in art for churches and cathedrals.

Albin’s son Fons (1901-72) and nephew Paul (1903-44) carried on the sacred tradition. Fons was a product of the Amsterdam Academy and also worked extensively in secular genres. His style suggests an expressionistic influence yoked to an earnest sentimentality that occasionally tiptoes up to the borders of saccharine in the case of Red Madonna (c1965) – but is otherwise delicate and lovely.

Tragically, Albin’s brother Paul, his wife and youngest daughter were killed in the Luftwaffe bombing of Roermond in 1944. Albin’s nephew Paul, a leader in the Dutch Resistance, was betrayed and shot by a German firing squad in Breda.

Fons’s daughter Margriet Windhausen (disclosure: taught me at high school) met Paul van den Bergh (disclosure: tried to teach me life drawing) at the Maastricht Academy in 1965, and moved to New Zealand in 1976, eventually settling in Maungati near Timaru.

Margriet is a painter and sculptor, perhaps better known for monumental public bronzes like the Abel Tasman Memorial (1992) on Lambton Quay, Wellington, and the Kate Sheppard Memorial (1993) in Christchurch. Here she exhibits a number of her stylised infant polychrome terracotta busts that immediately suggest the della Robbia brothers, while retain a slightly sinister Midwich Cuckoos feeling of disquiet. Margriet teaches at my old alma mater Roncalli College, and I have to admit to being fiercely fond of her as a mentor.

Paul van den Bergh tutors drawing and painting at Aoraki Polytechnic, where he is best known for regularly barking in a gruff growl “what you are drawing looks like a sea mammal”. From the Dürer-esque minutiae and Bruegel/Bosch fantasies of the 1980 etching “Man with a Mask” and after a prolonged abstract phase, Van den Bergh has returned to the complex nuances of figurative painting through a surrealistic lens. The colour values are exquisite. The influence of late Picasso threatens to beat you into submission with a baseball bat. The line is assured and sensual.

Between the two of them, Margriet and Paul have had a profound influence on several generations of South Canterbury artists (and one arts writer).

Paul Louis van den Bergh, one of Paul and Margriet’s three sons, who himself won first prize in the 1994 visual arts section of the Wearable Art Awards, came up with the idea for this exhibition.

Ward Windhausen, the fifth son of Fons Windhausen (are you keeping track?), still lives in Roermond. He gives all his paintings the title Merijn – the name of his first granddaughter. His paintings reveal a busy, brightly hued but controlled compositional plane strongly suggestive of the primativism of the KoBrA movement.

Hanneke Windhausen (Margriet’s niece) worked as a photojournalist for De Staatskraut newspaper in Amsterdam. Her installation Inside Outside (2004) is a mixed-media work of photographic portraits and papier-mâchè arranged in a ring. I think it is a little washed out by the much higher energy levels leaping off the walls around it.

Perhaps this isn’t the show-stopper of the year, but it is a wonderful testament to the power of family legacies, and familial artistic traditions we don’t see a lot of here. When so many galleries are busy trying to shove theory down your throat, occasionally it is nice to be gently told a story.