"It sparks my interest when a certain mystery
and age surrounds an object or even a place and when I notice
a certain beauty in the ordinary or the unlikely".
Andre van Berghem - Visual Artist
Profile:
Van Berghem was born in 1979 in Berghem, the Netherlands and is based in Ireland where he received a BA in Fine Art from the Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork. He has exhibited his work with galleries in the Republic of Ireland and at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin and with the Royal Ulster Academy at the Ulster Museum in Belfast.
Artist’s Practise
“From a young age I have had an interest in finding and collecting things of a natural origin, from the animal, mineral or plant world and on the other hand, man-made things of a certain age that had been forgotten, discarded, unvalued, worn or broken.
These objects speak strongly to my imagination as do the places where I find them, the natural landscapes and manmade landscapes. Around these themes I work both abstractly and figuratively in 2 and 3 dimensions as a painter and a sculptor.
Besides using more accepted or traditional media like paint, I enjoy the challenge of an unusual material. Part of my creative process is to work with the different qualities and challenges the material presents, and through working with these transform it into something new.
