Gert-Jan Akerboom-CV

Gert-Jan Akerboom
born: 05/07/78 Gouda (NL)

(Artist statement)
I’ve always been fascinated by ritual behavior. People performing
a prescribed procedure for a religious or other rite have been the
center of my work from the beginning.
I grew up in a reformed Christian community. although bothered by
the strictness and the many rules to be obeyed there, the rituals
connected to this way of living always interested me.
later i discovered that ritual (in the sense of being a prescribed
code for behavior or a pattern in which certain actions are performed),
are not restricted to religion at all. they belong to human life
and take many different forms.
My drawings are born out of this interest. i always want to know and
see what happens if... I combine different parts of found rituals,
play with scenery and invent new behavior patterns for the imaginary
participants to undertake. The rituals i invent have no purpose than
the ritual itself and i see my drawings as freeze frames (stills) of
these newly invented rituals or as designs of scenery for them to be
performed in.

(Education)
1990-1995 woodcrafts and building, de Wadde, Waddinxveen (NL)
1995-2000 graphic design and illustration, Grafisch Lyceum, Rotterdam (NL)
2000-2005 bachelor in fine arts, Willem de Kooning Academie, Rotterdam (NL)

(exhibitions)

(text by ken pratt on the "ground zero, size zero" show at Vegas Gallery London

The young Dutch artist, Gert-Jan Akerboom’s largescale drawings and installations of drawings are,
at their most simplistic level, figurative drawings achieved with a deftness of technical skill.
However, what Akerboom chooses to highlight –or place in shadow- with this most traditional of
artistic crafts often makes a dramatic difference to what we actually see. What, in effect, could
be fairly straightforward portraits are transformed into weird and strange vistas with distorted
perspective and areas of against-the-grain light and shade that change the normal into the
mystical and ritualistic. More recent works have seen the emergence of more full-blown
fantastic elements.

Akerboom is fairly candid about his work drawing in his personal experience of growing up in
an unusually religious community. And, whilst this is evident in the work, there is certainly
a departure from the socially decorous manifestation of Calvinism that often seems focussed
in its attempt to remove the dramatic, mystical and liminal aspect of (Catholic) Christian ritual.
Akerboom, by contrast dives headfirst into the world of ‘smells and bells’. Traditional Christian
allegorical imagery about transcendence, death myths and transformation are mixed up in a
convoluted language that takes in the world of subculture Gothic and street art. In many respects,
Akerboom’s imagery about the distortion, alteration and destruction of the mortal flesh is far
more ambivalent than a traditional Christian anxiety. The exciting and potentially positive
experience of our bodies becoming something else –something stronger, new and exciting-
inherent in Japanese anime and sci-fi in the trope of Transformers is equally evident in his work.
His is a world in which our flesh might eventually wither on the bone, but it might equally
become some powerful mutation, part machine of part superbeast.

(text by "MAMA" curator nous faes on the "twilight zone" show, at the year '07 artfair in london.

Gert-Jan Akerboom (1978) is best known for his large-scale drawings and installations. In his work traditional Christian allegorical imagery about transcendence, death myths and transformation are mixed up in a convoluted language that takes in the world of subculture Gothic and street art. Being raised in strict religious surroundings his work vibrates the smell of death, punishment and conspiracy and when moving from Rotterdam to Berlin in 2006 the mystical and ritualistic clearly take the lead in his work. A new series of fine ink drawings selected from his small scale sketchbooks show immense concrete dwellings, host to ‘eternal' symbols (fire, water, mirrors) acting as both maze and natural habitat for the undead.