Siep van den Berg - Figurative 1950s Gouache "harbour with boats at evening" signed 1 - Sold

• Dutch artist, painter and sculptor, born January 14, 1913 in Tirns, (municipality of Wymbritseradeel between Bolsward and Sneek). Died October 28, 1998 in Amsterdam.

'The power of what you have to say increases if you limit yourself', '(...) art has the task of making this life, which is a closed unity, clearer and more transparent'. Siep van den Berg is seen as one of the most important post-war Groningen modernists. Education: Académie la Grande Chaumière Paris (Figure Drawing) and Applied Arts School Groningen (evening course in Drawing and Painting). Had lessons from Jan Altink. He was married to Fie Werkman and therefore the son-in-law of HN Werkman. Biography: Siebren Ritsert van den Berg was born as the second of four sons in a Catholic family. His father was a blacksmith; his mother died in 1919 from the Spanish flu. The teacher and the pastor recognized Siep's drawing talent at an early age, but his father would rather see him learn a trade at the vocational school. Siep obeyed his father and became a house painter, but in addition to his work he still found time to make paintings occasionally. In the early 1930s he started an advertising agency and took painting lessons in the evenings at the Minerva Academy in Groningen. In his spare time he painted landscapes in a naturalistic style, with bright, cheerful colors. In 1937 his painting was discovered by HN Werkman who invited him to his studio. Although Van den Berg did not like the artists of De Ploeg, he was happy to make an exception for Werkman. A contact was made that would prove to be of great influence for Van den Berg. In 1943 he would marry his daughter Fietje and it was Werkman who drew his attention to the work of the French painter Cézanne, the founder of Cubism. His way of dealing with the imaginary space in the painting and his denial of the traditional rules of perspective resulted in a completely new visual language. In Cézanne, Sieb saw an artist who followed his own path and tried to portray what he observed in nature through experimentation and research. Not in a natural way, but by eliminating everything superfluous. Sybren Ridserd decides to become a professional painter in 1939 and rents the tea dome at the Sterrebos as a studio. Siep still went his own way and around this time mainly painted landscapes, later also still lifes. From 1947 onwards, the painter made an annual bimonthly study trip to Paris. At a private drawing school he was taught by Zadkine and Giacometti in drawing from models. He practiced endlessly in rapid sketching and refined his way of seeing. In Paris, under the influence of Cezanne's work, a shift towards division of the representation into planes and colors took place. From here, Siep would eventually evolve towards the geometric-abstract compositions that predominated in the painter's oeuvre from the 1950s onwards. The marriage to Fietje Werkman ended in divorce and in 1954 Siep van den Berg left for Amsterdam. However, he does not break with Groningen. He keeps the dome in the Sterrebos as a studio and is involved in the De Mangelgang gallery on the Lage der Aa, which opened in 1946. He himself exhibits there several times and brings other modern art there. The Friesland-born painter Siep van den Berg was inspired by Groningen modern art, De Ploeg and by his father-in-law Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman. But after moving west, his style changed to what he calls: "... moving further away from nature and even more into the imagination." His work developed from stylization and simplification until the end of the 1960s when he stopped working on examples from nature and let go of everyday reality. His work becomes abstract with a constructivist slant. With a visual idiom consisting of rectangles, squares and the use of primary colors: red, yellow, blue and black and white, the oeuvre of the Groningen artist Siep van den Berg fits into a period in which the COBrA artists predominate, the tradition of Mondrian, De Stijl and post-war constructivism. From 1966 onwards, Siep van den Berg was out of action for years due to Guillain-Barré's disease, but then returned with a creative explosion in which he definitively established his importance as a post-war artist working in geometric abstraction.