Guido van der Werve

Born in 1977 in Papendrecht (The Netherlands)
Lives and works in Berlin (Germany)

Guido van der Werve was raised playing classical piano, but changed to visual arts later in life. He studied Audio Visual Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in 2006 & 2007. He was also part of the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York, 2008, and resident at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, in 2011. Van der Werve initially started out as a performance artist, but unwilling to perform live and more than once, he began to document his performances. Developing this practice, he quickly got interested in film and cinematography, where he found an emotional directness similar to music, which he saw missing in visual arts. The key element of his works is still performance, but he adds music, text, sport and atmospheric scenes as returning elements. His works are characterized by long meditative shots and a refusal to work with actors. Since 2007 he has composed his own music. Van der Werve has created fifteen elaborate works, which have been exhibited and screened widely, finding recognition in both the art and film worlds. He has received many awards including the Volkskrant Beeldende kunst prijs in 2007, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Art in 2008, the Prix International d’Art Contemporain of the Foundation Prince Pierre de Monaco in 2010, the Charlotte Koehler Prijs from the Prins Bernhard Cultuur Fonds in 2012 and the Grand Prix (Gouden Kalf) for best short film at the Netherlands Film Festival in 2013. Van der Werve’s works have been exhibited extensively in venues such as the Kunsthalle Basel, MoMA/PS1, the Venice Biennale, Performa, the Moscow Biennial, the Istanbul Biennial and Manifesta. His works have been acquired by leading museums and institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Goetz Collection in Munich, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, The Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, The Boymans Museum in Rotterdam and the MWOODS museum in Beijing.

 Tom Morton has written of Guido van der Werve’s video on view at KB17: “Here, we see the artist walking steadily across the frozen waters, while behind him looms a vast ship, its prow smashing through the ice, then rearing up like a monstrous killer whale. Filmed in longshot, van der Werve seems frail and tiny, forever about to be swallowed by the abyss opening up behind him, forever hearing its great creaks, gulps and rumbles ringing in his ears. The icebreaker, though, lags continually behind, and we get to thinking about the effortlessness of his passage when compared to that of the behemoth to his rear. We might read it as a parable of man’s superiority to machine, until we remember that without the protective shell of the ship, van der Werve would never have been able to reach this inhospitable zone in the first place. This is not an image of man at one with nature, then, but of an excessive survival strategy, both sublime and ridiculous.”