Bovenberg, Bert

Background: merchant family.
Education: teacher training, art courses.
Profession/occupation: teacher and master in arts and handicraft.
Art form/medium: drawing and painting in watercolor, gouache and acrylic.
Start artwork: painting from 1978.
Relevant info: he portrayed the interior of his parental home and the farmhouses in the Langbroek region.
Exhibitions: Backyard Genius, Verbeke Foundation, Kemzeke 2009.
References: Van der Endt, Nico; Lexicon Nederlandse naïeve kunst van de twintigste eeuw / Lexicon of twentieth century Dutch naïve art, Venlo/Antwerpen, 1995, pp. 24-25.

Bert Bovenberg has been working as a teacher in an elementary school and as a master in arts and crafts in secondary education. In 1978 he started painting landscapes of villages, houses and interiors of his parental home. He produced a series of portrayed farmhouses in the Langbroek region. He soon came up against the problem of simultaneity; he found it highly unsatisfactory to be able to render only one single side of a house, a building or a square at a time. When he saw the reflection in the water of houses on either side of a harbour in Friesland, he arrived at a typical naïve solution of the problem, by folding over the images, resembling architecture cut-outs. After this, long linear watercolours in subdued shades came into being. From 1990 he favoured acrylic paintings, in which bright colors and personal symbolism play a more dominant role in order ‘to reproduce emotion’. And finally from 2002 on he has been sculpting in stead of painting.

Bert Bovenberg
1937 Schiedam, The Netherlands -