The Municipal Gallery bwa in Bydgoszcz and the Czarny Karzeł Foundation invite you to the exhibition “I am the monster” by Philip Akkerman, which is a part of the 12th International Festival Oko Nigdy Nie Śpi 2025 Kujawsko-Pomorskie – IGRZYSKA.
Philip Akkerman paints exclusively self-portraits. After forty years of work, there are thousands of them. They all have a similar format and are created like mirror images of the author: as he sits facing the canvas, looking into the eyes of the figure being painted. In doing so, he does not use a mirror or a photograph. He prefers to be guided by memory and imagination. Sometimes he quickly decides that the painting is finished. More often, however, he experiments with multiple layers of glazed colour, drawing plans that subtly shine one through the other, but not as ‘Saturday from under Sunday,’ but as the true local colour of things from under an optical illusion. In doing so, he reproduces the painstaking classical techniques and working stages of the old masters, which he has been methodically studying for decades. He begins with drawing on paper, through chiaroscuro en grisaille (i.e. grey value modelling) to the final colour organisation of the painting. This results in images with impressive qualities of naturalistic likeness, but also paintings that are, in his own words, ‘crazy’ – the result of impulsive decisions or pure chance, when the artist pulls paints or pigments out of a cassette at ‘random’. Days and sometimes weeks pass between subsequent coats of paint, for technical reasons. An effect designed for wet look does not work when the image dries, but the artist enthusiastically accepts these cases. “If you notice that you have made a mistake, fix it in the next image. That way, the one you are working on will be fresh and light,” he often repeats. This explains the artist’s modus operandi and also the strict self-restriction: to a single theme and format. This makes it easier to focus. Staying within the frame of once-accepted assumptions, one can observe the changeability of what – no matter how violent and acute – passes. One painting holds the entire stakes of a painterly resolution every time. Beyond the sheer joy of experimentation and the perverse making of successive attempts to solve the same equation with a different result, there is also a series of justifications behind Akkerman’s self-portraits that are as philosophical as they are unpretentious.
His idols are the Renaissance masters of panel painting, the Expressionists, Van Eyck, Van Gogh, Otto Dix but also Bob Ross, the TV painting teacher and author of the liberating maxim: “Remember, it’s your painting and you can do what you want with it.” For Akkerman, the choice of art is a choice of radical freedom. In his words: “When it comes to a painting, you don’t have to explain yourself to anyone, not even to yourself. Art has no duty. The artist does not have to pursue any goals; they can obey only the impulses they feel.” And yet, laying down the final strokes of paint, he is quite nervous. Why? As a persistent reader of Schopenhauer, he knows that we ultimately construct worlds in the likeness of our own imaginations throughout our lives. In this sense, however, each of these is our self-portrait and everyone somehow testifies about us.
Anna Mituś
Philip Akkerman made his début in the 1980s. His paintings can be found in collections: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Rotterdam, Centraal Museum Utrecht, Drents Museum Assen, Ferens Art Gallery Hull, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum Braunschweig, Hirshhorn Museum Washington DC, Museum Arnhem, Museum More Gorssel, Museum Voorlinden Wassenaar, New Walk Museum & Art Gallery Leicester, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Schunck Museum Heerlen, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Teylers Museum Haarlem, Today Art Museum Beijing.
14.08.2025 – 21.09.2025
20 Gdańska St.
