musetouch_issue_11

Chris Berens
Chris Berens was born in 1976 in Oss, the Netherlands, near the historic town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch
(a.k.a. Den Bosch), the birthplace of Hieronymous Bosch.
When he was a boy, his father brought him to many exhibitions of the Dutch Golden Age
painters, including Frans Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer, and those images became infused
into the internal world he began imagining as a child. He studied illustration at the Academy
of Art and Design in Den Bosch, graduating in 1999.
While working as a freelance illustrator, Berens began to teach himself to paint in several
dilapidated buildings in the rural area near his childhood home. Attempting to emulate
the painting methods of the Old Masters and 19th-century academic artists like Ingres and
Bouguereau, he learned by copying their work, and eventually came upon a technique which
allowed him to achieve an otherwordly dreamlike impression of the qualities he admired in
his predecessors.
More recently, Berens relocated to Amsterdam, where he began exhibiting his work in 2004.
After four sold-out shows at Amsterdam’s Jaski Gallery, Berens made the move to infiltrate
the American art market in 2008, at Seattle’s well-known pop surrealism gallery, Roq la Rue.
That sold-out show was his first exposure to American collectors, and the sudden appearance
of an artist exhibiting his technical sophistication and evocative dreamlike motifs caused a
sensation in pop surrealism circles.
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chrisberens.com