In the weekend of 3 to 5 September, the gallery season will be festively opened in Amsterdam. From 4 September, you can visit TORCH Gallery, where you can see Philip Akkerman's solo exhibition 'From a madman, for a madman' (‘Van een gek, voor een gek’). Since 1981, this Dutch painter and draftsman has exclusively made self-portraits, over ten thousand by now.
Akkerman: "I am a painter. A painter of self-portraits. By the time I’ll be fifty, I'll have painted about two thousand and five hundred of them. All those paintings are made with tense facial and butt muscles and a clenched fist. It is not a game, it's a struggle. At first I painted myself, as you would expect in a self-portrait. I painted while looking in the mirror to see if everything was just right. But quite soon, I had to conclude, my interest in the reflection faded. The painting became more important. I wanted to make beautiful paintings. Philip Akkerman had to make way for the painting."
Since his subject matter is predetermined, this offers possibilities in terms of technique and style. In fact, Akkerman sees his work as an investigation into the possibilities of the self-portrait and painting in general, drawing inspiration from Western art history. He uses a multitude of techniques and styles that have been used over the centuries: from gouache to highlight, from hyperrealism to abstraction. These portraits are not necessarily flattering and are mainly recognisable on the basis of his gruff look and somewhat hard features. The reason for his self-study, which may have gotten a bit out of hand, was a book he read in 1981, containing five hundred self-portraits from European art history. Akkerman studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and at Ateliers ’63 in (then) Haarlem. There he resisted the widely popular conceptual art, but also his teachers, who encouraged him to be original and to develop a unique style. But Akkerman was not interested in that at all: “Technique is the only thing an artist should be working on.”
Akkerman's work has been included in the collections of, among others, the Centraal Museum, Museum Voorlinden, the Stedelijk Museum, the Rijksmuseum, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Teylers Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and the Today Art Museum in Beijing.