Biography
Henk Pander was born in 1937, in Haarlem in the Netherlands. His father was an artist who specialized in Bible illustrations, and over half of Henk’s nine brothers and sisters became artists. From an early age he was devoted to art, learning from his father at nine years old to paint landscapes in watercolor. Pander’s childhood was deeply marked by the experience of growing up during World War II, and the German occupation of the Netherlands. Dramatic memories of his family’s fear, deprivation, and the violence around them became the source for his highly personal style of history painting that was to emerge decades later.
Pander studied at the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, on a full scholarship. His artistic character was shaped by the academic training he received there, as well as by the Dutch tradition of painting, with its devotion to representing the visible world. Pander was especially drawn to its darker aspects, typified by the tradition of momento mori, still life memories of the deceased. While at school, he was exposed to the 20th century’s first wave of Expressionism, represented by Kirchner and his fellow German Expressionists, and by the Cobra painters, mid-century European Abstract Expressionists. The emotional urgency and visual freedom seen in both groups were important aspects of Pander’s own approach.
After graduating from the Rijksacademie in 1961, Pander received a commission from the Dutch government to document the changing face of Amsterdam. His own art during this period involved dark ink wash drawings, whose existential melancholy Pander connects with the work of Goya. In 1963, while in Rome, he met an American woman, with whom he was later married and had two sons. Although they were divorced a few years later, the marriage led to Pander’s moving to Portland, OR where he has lived and worked since the mid-1960s. The artist’s sense of dislocation, of being separated from his original family and culture, and set loose in contemporary America, has given his work’s some of its specific psychic gravity.
Theater set designs and commissioned portraits in the 1970s preceded a 1984 mural project at Oregon State University, a turning point in his work. A research trip to the WW I battlefields of France, and the work of the painter Anselm Kiefer, led Pander to realize how his own personal relationship to history could be the subject of his art. The outpouring of paintings and drawings over the next two decades, depicting his wartime childhood, emergency medical squads, prison life, NASA labs, desert airplane graveyards, environmental degradation, and the post 9/11 World Trade Center site all reflect his concern for painting a picture of our time.
Pander’s work has been the subject of over 40 solo exhibitions, including those at the Portland Art Museum in 2001, and at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle in 2004. His work is in many public collections, and recently over 100 of the artist’s sketchbooks, drawing, and etchings have been acquired by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
John Mendelsohn |
