Torsos by Dutch sculptor Eja Siepman van den Berg Beauty in ...

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Issue 15
23 October 2012
Torsos by Dutch sculptor Eja Siepman van den Berg
Beauty in repose, timeless and pure
Sculptures of exceptional peace and calm
Dutch sculptor Eja Siepman van den Berg (born in Eindhoven,
1943) lives and works in the village of Beetsterzwaag in the
northern Dutch province of Friesland. She makes sculptures in
bronze and marble and some in glass. She completed her studies
at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam in
1967, and was awarded the Dutch Prix de Rome the same
year. She has exhibited in numerous art galleries in the Netherlands
and abroad. Her sculptures are also to be found in private
collections, museums and corporate collections. She has a permanent
exhibition in the DEPOT Gallery in Wageningen, the
Netherlands. Eja Siepman van den Berg comes from an artistic
family. Her great-grandmother was a professional sculptor and
worked in a studio in Hannover, her grandmother had a gift for
drawing, and her daughter Anteunet studied Art History.
As a young girl Eja was fascinated by modelling clay. When she
was 25 she started her career as a sculptor in her living-room
studio in Amsterdam.
Venus, 158 cm, bronze.
Meisjestors, 65 cm, bardiglio
“Making sculptures is addictive,” says Eja Siepman. “I think the human
body has many nuances and it never stops intriguing me. I start with an
idea, which has to be clear, so that I can then build the structure. I shape
the body around it later. I still use my great-grandmother’s modelling
tool. It has a very comfortable grip. I have inherited all her tools: great
palette knives and wire loop tools for modelling.”
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The DEPOT Sculpture Gallery, Villa Hinkeloord, Wageningen,
the Netherlands. Eja Siepman van den Berg is one of
only a few living artists who have a permanent exhibition of
their work. A broad selection of her oeuvre is on display in
Wageningen. Opening hours: Thursday to Sunday from 11
am to 5 pm. Website: www.hetdepot.nl
Seasonal work
Eja Siepman van den Berg takes an average of 3
months to complete a single sculpture, allowing her
to achieve a production of 3 to 4 sculptures a year.
“It is seasonal work, really,” she says. “If I can work
without interruption, I produce one sculpture in
every season.”
Eja Siepman van den Berg is a sculptor
of international renown. Her statues are
partial representations of the human
body: they have no head, no arms and
sometimes no legs. She can be called
a classical sculptor with an innovative
modern stile. ”I don’t really feel at home
in figurative sculpture,” Eja says.
“I felt that I was on my own from a very
early stage in my career. I don’t belong
to any particular movement. My work is
rooted in classic sculpture, but I think it
definitely is contemporary art.”
De Vaas, 79 cm, white marble.
Video fragment made on location at Binder Bronsgieterij in Haarlem, the Netherlands (www.binderart.nl) by
Deen van der Zaken in collaboration with Stijn van der Loo of Studio BBH in Amsterdam
(www.stijnvanderloo.com). Eja Siepman van den Berg has been working together with bronze foundry
Binder in Haarlem for many years.
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Eja Siepman van den Berg (born 1943
in Eindhoven - the Netherlands).
One of Siepman’s successes was the sale of one of her
works to the American film producer Roman Polanski, who
bought her sculpture “Stap” for his swimming pool on Ibiza.
Polanski, who used to be a sculptor himself, recognised in
her work a unique combination of the beauty of Classical art
with the energy of contemporary abstract art. Throughout the
centuries, sculptors have made the human figure their subject.
Each period, region and culture adds its own formal
conventions and records its own discourse and ideology in
human figures. The resulting images combine to form a history
of art.
Good art always contains elements from art history, filtered
through the artist’s perception of the here and now. Eja Siepman
manages to imbue her sculptures with an extraordinary
sense of timelessness. Her work expresses exceptional peace
and calm - what we might call groundedness - using
poses we already know from Egyptian sculptures, bas-reliefs
and paintings. Another essential feature of her work is its
frontality - the fact that the composition looks complete, without
any lateral movement, when viewed from the front.
Sculptures by Eja Siepman van den Berg can be found in
public buildings in the Netherlands, as well as abroad. Her
work has been installed in the lobbies of the Dutch Parliament.
She also sold one of her sculptures to the Dutch
embassy in Athens.
Christine van Stralen,
Bureau for Art Projects, Almere.
Tel. 00-31-36-522 79 19 - 00-31-6-10 305 605
www.kunstprojekten.nl - info@kunstprojekten.nl.
Eja Siepman van den Berg won the Charlotte
van Pallandt Prize in 1978. She was the very
first person to win this prize, named after the
great Dutch sculptress (left on the photo above)
who died in 1997 at the age of 99. The
prize is awarded to talented young sculptors
in the Netherlands. “Charlotte van Pallandt
has been a shining example to me,“ says Eja
Siepman. “Her work is very powerful and intriguing.”
Torsje, 30 cm, white onyx.
Grote staande, bronze, 150 cm.
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Eja Siepman van den Berg seeks to find the essence of the human figure
through a process of radical abstraction. Her quest culminated in torsos,
which allow her to concentrate fully on the shape, thus intensifying
the sculptural language. The torso is ideally suited to portraying emotional
tension, particularly when it is incomplete. With great precision and empathy,
Siepman van den Berg communicates the tension beneath the taut gleaming
skin of her bronze and marble works in a way that is almost tangible.
Exquisitely sculpted and with a consummate finish, her detached yet sensual
work stands and poses in complete tranquility, exuding the purity of young,
self-aware life.
From: Sotheby’s, Global contemporary, Artists for artists 2010.
Photo right: “De Vaas, made from bardiglio, which occurs in all kinds of varieties.
Eja Siepman likes to work with different types of marble, as it is very pure material.
”Marble is very good for depicting the different volumes of the skin; you can
show minute differences on a convex surface.”
Zigzag-tors, 90 cm, inspired by
Gerrit Rietveld’s Zigzag Chair.
“You try to grasp something that is elusive.”
Eja Siepman van den Berg lives and works in the historic former town hall
of the Frisian village of Beetsterzwaag. This is where she finds her inspiration.
She feels most at ease in the special ambience of her studio. She is
currently working in the former mayor’s chamber. Eja explains:”Sculpting
has always had a great attraction for me. There have been sculptors for
thousands of years. They’re always slightly odd people, who dedicate
themselves to shaping material into a specific form. I knew at an early age
that I wanted to become a sculptor. I didn’t need to think about that. As a
child, I always worked with a kind of coloured modelling clay. What is so
fascinating about it is that you see something taking shape in your hands;
you’ve got something in your mind, and you can produce it. That’s like magic.
It’s not so much the beauty of a sculpture you’re aiming for. You try to
grasp something that is elusive. A shape, which for some reason you feel
touched by, like the tender youth of a young girl’s body. It is an engrossing
process to capture that in a sculpture.”
Sketch for Zigzag-tors.
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Brancusi: The father of modern sculpture
Eja Siepman van den Berg specialised
in both additive sculpture
and subtractive sculpture from an
early age. For many consecutive
years she has visited the famous
marble region of Carrara in Tuscany.
She studied with Paul
Grégoire and Piet Esser in Amsterdam
from 1962 to 1967. At
that time she was greatly impressed
by the work of the Romanian
master Constantin Brancusi such
as Le Baiser - The Kiss. “I used
to be enthralled by Brancusi’s
work, so I started with a bit of an
abstract bias. Later I longed to
return to the human body, but you
never get rid of that affinity with
abstraction.”
Handen, 100 cm, bronze. These
hands are not clasped, but touch one
another in gentle repose.
Fred Wagemans, owner of the art gallery
Kunstruimte Wagemans in Beetsterzwaag
(www.kunstruimte.nl), is one of the people
who has done a lot to promote Eja Siepman's
career. Apart from running an art gallery, Fred
is a culture historian, a former art conservator
for various museums and an advisor for the
Mondriaan Fund. He has a large number of Eja
Siepman's art works in his gallery. Their
cooperation dates back to the end of 1996.
Fred has displayed her work at various art fairs.
Contact details:
Eja Siepman van den Berg
Beetsterzwaag, the Netherlands
Tel. 0031-512 38 34 46
E-Mail: info@ejasiepmanvandenberg.nl
Website: www.ejasiepmanvandenberg.nl
Lopend meisje, bronze, 90 cm
“I believe that art is always
deeply rooted in transience.
It is always either an ode or
a lament to life.”
During her study Eja made
a pilgrimage to Brancusi’s
studio in Paris. ”Brancusi is
the father of modern sculpture,”
she says. “He started
to reduce shapes to their
essence, omitting any distracting
details.” Eja also
admires the French sculp-
tors Aristide Maillol and
Charles Despiau and the
German artist Wilhelm
Lehmbruck.
Interplay of surfaces and lines
“My main theme is the human torso,” Eja
explains. “I don’t like doing heads, because
the personality gets in the way
then and you start to reproduce a specific
person. What I like about torsos is
that they are anonymous. Head and
hands often give a sculpture a psychological
meaning, and I want to focus on its
visual impression. I’m more interested in
the interplay of surfaces, lines and volumes
than in the human being as such.
I want to express the fulness and versatility
of life.” Eja Siepman van den Berg
also makes glass sculptures, which are
cast by the renowned Dutch glass artist
Vincent van Ginneke in Almere.
Tors, 56 cm, bardaglio, with a work
by Leon Adriaans in the background.
Koude Steen, 87 cm, bronze. The painting in
the background is by Jan Frank from New York.
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