Chris Berens

He lives in Amsterdam with his wife Esther and their daughters Emma & Juno Leeuwenhart.

• Name — Chris Berens • Born — 19 June 1976 • Birthplace — Oss, Netherlands • Known for — Painter • Training — AKV St. Joost • Notable Works — Circle of Friends On a Midnight Voyage The Departure Utopiary

Chris Berens was born in 1976 in Oss, Netherlands, near the historic town of 's-Hertogenbosch, the birthplace of Hieronymous Bosch, a factor that would feature in his artistic development. 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 AKV St. Joost 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 otherworldly 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. In 2009, he had his first museum retrospective, in which 13 of his paintings were exhibited at the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch. In 2010, Berens was commissioned to create the cover for Blondie's album Panic of Girls. He also supplied the artwork for German singer Xavier Naidoo's 2009 album Alles kann besser werden, which features a painting called "The Big Blue." Berens has been the subject of a television documentary. Chris Berens, Master of his Magical Universe was made for Dutch broadcaster Avro’s Close Up series in 2013 and has since been broadcast several times in the Netherlands and abroad. Berens also featured prominently in the television documentary Krabbé searches for Van Gogh, in which actor/painter Jeroen Krabbé traced the path of Vincent van Gogh in co-operation with Dutch artists.

In his work, Berens represents an imaginary world he has been seeing since he was a child. "As a boy, I was pretty much what I am now – a dreamer... I always had this really special feeling over me... It's a feeling of another place, a warm place, deep inside me, and I fill that place with all that I see and hear." This internal universe is painted as if it is being viewed through a distorted lens, which gives the viewer a sense of peering into a secret world, inhabited by mysterious human figures from another age and a menagerie of real and fanciful animals. He told an interviewer, "I simply try to paint the world inside my head. This world has been with me since I was a child. It is populated by people and animals and is filled with landscapes, villages, cities and scenes. All kinds of things happen in this world and various stories unfold. But it's not the 'normal' world, and they are not the things that happen in the regular world." Although his 2009 exhibition, "The Only Living Boy In New York," was inspired by the impending birth of his first child, his most frequently revisited theme is death. In paintings like "In Paradisum," "Circle of Friends," "On a Midnight Voyage" and "First Snow, Guide Me Home," he had explored various facets of the experience of dying, as he believes that there is "a great deal of beauty present in the moment of death. After witnessing the pain and struggle of dying, you also experience the lightness of acceptance and letting go." While he feels he is not yet capable of depicting what he envisions to its full potential, he says he strives to improve his skills rapidly, because he is driven to bring these visions into reality. "The reason I paint, is because for me, for now, this is the way to get closest to what I actually see. I suppose you could call it my soul, or the center of me, or my essence." In reference to his most recent exhibition, his Seattle gallerist stated, "This new series of works, entitled "Leeuwenhart" ("Lion Heart") takes a turn from his last body of work, which depicted icicle-like skyscrapers and New York cityscapes that sparkled like diamonds, to more of a lush, fairytale world of forests, rolling green hills, and ancient looking villages. And while the usual assortment of magical animal spirits show up in all the works, another character makes an appearance, Chris' newborn daughter Emma Leeuwenhart Berens." On occasion, Berens openly references the work of past masters like Ingres, Bouguereau, and Delaroche, because his youthful immersion in their work introduced their subjects, environments and atmosphere into his visionary universe. While these homage paintings often borrow specific elements such as costume and composition, they invariably lift their subjects into a surreal narrative that could never have been conceived by their original creators. Berens explained, "Bouguereau, Ingres, Vermeer and others, I've known by heart ever since I was a little boy... I know them. I'm safe with them. Sometimes I miss them as you can suddenly miss your childhood. So I recreate them, for comfort."