Henk van Woerden - Large mixed media (including Pastel) - signed - beautifully framed

• The work of this Dutch/South African visual artist and writer does not appear often. It is usually stuck in collections and unfortunately it has not aged very well. he was also primarily a writer. He made this large abstract mixed media on paper in the 1970s. Top size 68x47cm. Signed upper right and titled upper left. Beautifully framed.

Henk (Hendrik Willem Jan) van Woerden was born in Leiden on December 6, 1947. He grew up as the eldest in a family of four children and lost sight in one of his eyes at an early age. His mother came from a family of gentlemen farmers from Groningen and his father came from an orthodox reformed family of candy manufacturers from Delft.
In 1957 the family emigrated to South Africa. Van Woerden initially ended up in an Afrikaans-speaking environment in a suburb of Cape Town, but attended an English-language secondary school in the same city. When he left the Netherlands, his mother was already ill and she died after a few years from a chronic intestinal ailment. His father, an instrument maker and freelance photographer, then emigrated again to Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) and then to Israel. The author lived in a foster home for some time.
After high school, Van Woerden took drawing and painting lessons for several years at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town. He wrote articles about art for the university newspaper. His disgust with the apartheid policies of the white government became so great that he decided to return to Europe in 1968. He first lived with his grandmother in Bussum for a few months and then in Crete for a few years. During this phase he also traveled to Turkey and Iran, eventually settling in Amsterdam. However, he would often stay in Greece and from 1989 he also regularly visited South Africa again.
Van Woerden has enjoyed fame as a visual artist since the 1970s. His paintings, photographs and drawings have been regularly exhibited in Amsterdam's Galerie Espace and other galleries since 1972; His visual work is extensively represented in collections at home and abroad, including: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Museum of Modern Art, Arnhem; Municipal Museum, Schiedam; Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede; collections of the Universities of Stellenbosch and Cape Town; many private collections in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and South Africa.