Lex ter Braak

Lex Ter Braak (1950, the Netherlands) pictures the fleeting and neglected, the unseen, the painful, the moving and changeable – such as an inconsiderable shrub that resists its fence as it blooms, a battered tree in an industrial estate, picking blossoms on polluted ground, blown leaves on the highway, tree stumps sticking out of the ground like amputated limbs, shreds of landscape that yearn for more. For him, these are just as many manifestations of idiosyncratic beauty, perseverance and resistance. He sees in it an order and story that are beyond our understanding, but which can have mythical proportions when transposed. He zooms in on it, leaving the context out of the picture, so that they can tell their own story, sometimes intensified by the painterly interventions. The emphatically admonishing or politically engaged seems absent, but anyone who can read the signs of the human condition sees great involvement with the world around us.