Lake Ontario Hall Wall Gallery, Allendale Campus
July 12 - December 13, 2024

Open During Building Hours.

Hendrik (Henk) Cornelis Krijger (19 November 1914—27 September 1979) was the son of Protestant missionaries. He was born and raised in the Dutch East Indies, a colony that did not gain independence until 1949 and is now known as Indonesia. As a teenager, Krijger was sent to the Netherlands for his education and began his artistic career before the Second World War. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he contributed to works under the pseudonym Lodewijk Brouwer to De Bezige Bij (The Busy Bee), an Amsterdam publishing house illegally founded in 1944 that actively supported the resistance. After the war, he continued to work in the book industry as a graphic designer and illustrator and developed a new typeface - Raffia Initials – recalling the flourish of Baroque typography. 

In 1969, Krijger, a deeply religious man, moved to Chicago, where he served as the lead artist of the Institute for Christian Art (ICA). Plagued with financial difficulties, the ICA failed two years later. Krijger made an ill-fated attempt to revive the arts organization, renamed Patmos Workshop and Gallery, in Toronto, Canada. Krijger became disenchanted with Patmos and in 1973, he returned to the Netherlands, where he died five years later. Nevertheless, his artistic contributions can be witnessed in the work of his colleagues in the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands.

His art is difficult to categorize. Krijger worked with a variety of media, crossing back and forth between them, and his style was not uniform. Throughout his career, he produced drawings, paintings, prints, and sculptures, often experimenting with a mixture of found materials. Although Krijger’s artistry frequently seems to be placed at the threshold betwixt and between the real and the imaginative, it is not merely an extension of early twentieth-century Dutch Symbolism and Expressionism. His imagery is deeply shaped by his childhood experiences in Indonesia, his artistic training in the Netherlands, and by his personal struggles with the Christian faith that he could not leave.

In many ways, Krijger fought against aesthetic purity, preferring ambiguity and inclusion. While in Chicago, Krijger began to sign his works with “Senggih,” after the way his childhood friends mispronounced Henkje (“Little Hank”). This somewhat self-facing gesture marks his continual preoccupation with questions of cultural diversity and personal identity. His art is informed by the crossing of continents, themes, and artistic media.

This retrospective highlights gifts recently donated to the collection at Grand Valley State University, which holds the largest public collection of Henk Krijger’s work. It was guest curated by Henry Luttikhuizen, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Scholar-in-Residence, and a specialist in Dutch art. To view more of Krijger's work, please visit our online collection of Henk Krijger.

To further his education, Krijger moved from Indonesia to the city of Amsterdam at the age of fourteen. Upon leaving the city’s protestant (Calvinist) gymnasium, he enrolled in local art institutes, where he learned techniques and principles of applied design. Although Krijger produced figurative imagery throughout his career, his interest in optical naturalism was short-lived. Already as a student in his early twenties, Krijger started focusing on the representation of inner character and psychological responses to nature. His work resembles that of Charley Toorop and other Dutch Expressionist artists. In Krijger’s Self-Portrait, a large palette, calling attention to his vocation, hangs on the wall directly behind the artist. Nevertheless, he does not hold a brush, nor does he give any indication of being a tortured soul. On the contrary, Krijger appears comfortable with himself, crossing his arms and wearing his Sunday-best, complemented by a fashionable hat and pair of earrings.

Although Raising Traps in the Morning is neither a sacred icon nor a depiction of a biblical narrative, it is filled with religious connotations. The New Testament contains numerous references to fish. In Krijger’s image, a lone figure gathers fish from his nets. A pristine white seagull accompanies the man. Within this context, the fisherman’s daily labors are associated with the redemption of the world. His mundane deed not only serves as an allusion to the former occupation of some of Christ’s apostles, but it also elicits notions of evangelizing, of being a fisher of men and women (Matt. 4:19). However, Krijger’s art is not cloistered by his faith. On the contrary, it is informed by modernist art with no direct ties to Christianity. Krijger’s color strategies and his child-like forms derive from CoBrA imagery (a European avant-garde art group active from 1948-51), especially that produced by the artist Karel Appel.

Like many Dutch-Canadian immigrants, Henk Krijger lived in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation. He worked as an illustrator for an underground press and smuggled potatoes into Amsterdam. Krijger also endured the Hongerwinter of 1944-45, when millions of Dutch citizens starved in response to crop failures and a food embargo imposed by the Nazis for the Netherlands supporting the Allies. Although he was not a Jew, Krijger witnessed their persecution and deportation. He resisted the Nazis and was later horrified by the news of the Holocaust. In 1972, Krijger produced The Survivors, an image of tragic-heroic figures who have been wounded by tragedy yet able to persevere. The picture is rendered on used paint rags, easily discarded detritus that here endures. Like the soiled remnants, four totemic figures, based on Indonesian sculptures, function as metaphors for an injured humanity that regardless of circumstance retains its worthiness. They look clumsy and awkward yet possess the power to stand upright and hold their own as they seem to be pushed and pulled across space.

Location

Lake Ontario Hall Wall Gallery
Lake Ontario Hall, Allendale Campus
4023 Calder Dr
Allendale, MI 49401

For directions and parking information visit www.gvsu.edu/maps.

Contact

For special accommodation, please call:
(616) 331-3638

For exhibition details and media inquires, please email:
Joel Zwart, Curator of Exhibitions
[email protected]

For learning and engagement opportunities, please email [email protected].