Willem van genk biography for kids
Willem van Genk
Dutch painter
Willem van Genk (April 2, 1927 – May 12, 2005) was a Dutch painter and graphic artist, celebrated as one of the leading masters of Outsider Art. Throughout his life he lived with severe mental distress, experiencing symptoms related to autism and schizophrenia. On account of his passion for trains, buses, and train stations, he called himself the "King of Stations".
Van Genk's panoramic cityscapes and fragmented collages express his feelings about modern authority, feelings which were shaped by an abusive father who, in addition to administering his own beatings, left him exposed to a traumatic experience at the hands of the Gestapo during the German occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War.
Van Genk's art has been widely exhibited in Europe, where it is also in many museum collections, including those of the Stedelijk Museum, the Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent, the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, the Lille Metropole Musee d’Art Modern, d’Art Contemporain et d’Art Brut (LaM), the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art in Zagreb, the Zander Collection in Cologne, and the Museum of Everything in London.Raw Vision, the leading magazine covering Art Brut, ranks van Genk among the "masters of outsider art". At the beginning of 2005, the year of the artist's death, van Genk's Keleti Station, now in the collection of the Museum of Everything in London, sold for a hundred thousand dollars at New York's Outsider Art Fair, thus setting the record for most expensive work ever sold by a living outsider artist. On that occasion, Roberta Smith, the chief art critic of The New York Times, praised the piece "as the leading candidate for best in show".[1] At least one other critic has identified van Genk as the most important Dutch outsider artist.
Willem van Genk: Mind Traffic, the first solo exhibition of the artist in the United States,
Dutch, 20th century.
Born 1927, Voorberg; died 2005, the Hague.
Willem Van Genk, (1927 - 2005), was born in Voorburg in the Netherlands, the youngest child and only son in a family of ten. His mother died when he was five. He suffered from severe health and behavioral problems. Van Genk started drawing at home and at school, as a substitute for his dreams of travels to distant countries. He was eventually placed in an orphanage, and then a Christian school specializing in arts and crafts. Here, he studied advertising and graphics for two years but proved incapable of adapting to demands made on him. He was transferred to a home for the mentally handicapped in the The Hague, where he received a small salary for his activities in the workshop. With this money, Van Genk bought himself painting materials. His principal sources of inspiration were tourist guides, collected photographs, and, in particular, his voyages to the Soviet Union, Rome Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen, Cologne, and Prague. Van Genk often portrayed the conflict between good and evil, with God, Lenin, and Mao Zedong facing up the Devil, Hitler, and Stalin. His work appeared in exhibitions but he refused to sell to private collectors. Van Genk gave up painting in 1988.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS Genk, Willem van Parnasky Culture, 1972 oil on fibreboard 70 x 142 cm © photo credit Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne van Genk, Willem, (1927-2005), Netherlands Willem van Genk (1927–2005) was born in Voorburg, in the Netherlands, the only boy in a family of ten children. He lost his mother when he was four and was afflicted with learning difficulties and behavioural problems at a very early age. He began to draw at school and at home, finding in this mode of expression an escape from a lonely and difficult childhood. After a spell in an orphanage until he was thirteen, he went to live in The Hague and attended a technical school, which he left before finishing his education. His search for work led to a job in an advertising agency; a few years later, still a teenager, he was once again placed in an orphanage, then in a Christian school of arts and crafts, where he took courses in commercial art. Unable to adapt socially, he lost his job and was finally taken in by a workshop for the mentally handicapped in The Hague. Living alone in a small apartment where he had disconnected all the electrical plugs, he spent his small wage on art materials. His pictures used complex cut-up and collage processes and were directly inspired by his many visits to the Soviet-bloc countries, Rome, Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen, Cologne, Prague and elsewhere. He also went for his ideas to various guidebooks and his own travel photos. In 1988 he concentrated mainly on making model buses and in the 1990s he limited himself to producing copies of earlier works, using different coloured pens. In 1966 a series of heart attacks prevented him from painting, and two years later he was admitted to an old people's home. All the works in his home in The Hague were moved out and the apartment completely emptied. On 12 May 2005 Willem van Genk died of pneumonia.
2019
Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler, American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY
2014
Willem Van Genk, American Folk Art Museum, New York
2010
The Museum of Everything, Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, Turin
2008
Heterotopia: Works by Willem van Genk and Others, Deutsches Architektur Museum, Frankfurt
2006
Inner Worlds Outside, traveling exhibition, Sala de Exposiciones de la Fundacíon "La Caixa," Madrid; WhiteChapel Gallery, London; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
2005
Dubuffet & Art Brut, traveling exhibition, Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf, Germany; Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne; Museum of Modern van Genk, Willem
Parnasky Culture
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Exhibition(s) at the Art Brut Collection
Dutch, 20th century.
Born 1927, Voorberg; died 2005, the Hague.
Willem Van Genk is an Outsider Artist whose work is not limited to one genre. His oeuvre is nevertheless unified by his modus operandi: to create art as a way of ordering chaos and of protecting himself from harm.
Van Genk was born in Voorberg, the Netherlands in 1927, and struggled greatly with physical and emotional illness. Suffering isolation and rejection throughout his childhood, he was placed in an orphanage. During this time, he was enrolled in arts workshops, where he gained limited skills, while still being allowed to develop a highly personal mode of artmaking. He was diagnosed with both autism and schizophrenia.
Railways and travel are a prevalent thread running through the oeuvre of Van Genk. He made elaborate paintings, richly layered with collage elements. Inspired by his own travels, as well as by commercial travel guides, he created visually dazzling vistas in which trains provide a setting for mysterious narratives. Typically delineated by elaborate systems of lines, Van Genk’s cityscapes reveal what scholars have claimed to be the artist’s penchant for ordering a disordered world. He eventually shifted his activities to creating models of busses from found materials.
Due to a wartime confrontation with the Gestapo, Van Genk developed an excessive fear of authority figures in overcoats. After he was moved to a nursing home due to ill health, efforts to clean out his apartment revealed an extensive installation—including numerous hand-decorated overcoats—constructed over time by the artist to protect his home from imaginary invaders.
While Outsiders often operate from a perspective radically different than our own, we have much to learn from artists like Van Genk, who responded to adversity with singular dedication