Biography
Berend Hoekstra is internationally known both as an artist and as a collector of important African and Oceanic art. In his ink and oil drawings on paper, the artist focuses on individual motifs. On the light backgrounds of the paper, he sketches animals or individual body parts such as eyes, phalli or hands with gestural strokes. It seems obvious to draw a connection between his art work and his passion for the objects of foreign cultures to which one can ascribe cultic or magical functions and meanings. Since the beginning of his passion for collecting in the 1980s, Hoekstra has approached the objects he was able to acquire in the galleries of Amsterdam and Brussels with the scientific meticulousness of a researcher. However, he could and would never fully understand the objects in his collection, Hoekstra said in an interview. And Hoekstra's sketchy, fragmentary drawings remain just as vague in their meaning.
