Simon Schrikker

Simon Schrikker lives and works in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He studied at the Minerva art academy, Groningen, the Royal Academy of Art in Gent (Belgium) and got his MFA at the Dutch Art Institute in Enschede.

The works of Simon Schrikker are a battle between form and content, between painted matter and painted image. His subjects have an apparent simplicity: he paints stray dogs, sharks, squids and recently rocky seascapes. But these images are not illustrations from a book on animal life or nature. For one thing, the images seem to struggle to emerge from the paint. In this sense, these paintings clearly identify themselves as paintings. The medium is part of the message. And since the animals that Simon paints are associated with several degrees of danger and fear, there is also a certain aggression in his images. This aggression returns in the painterly way the surface is treated. As a result of this dialectic, Simon’s work flirts with expressive abstraction: the images arise from matter but immediately seem to disappear into it again, leaving the audience to unravel what it is they are looking at. This dialectic is the engine that propels Simon’s work: what moves on the canvas is, ultimately, a painterly gesture.

Recently his working field extended from exclusively oil paintings on canvas to watercolor, sculptures and murals.

Schrikkers work can be found both in private and corporate collections in the Netherlands and abroad