Gerard Boersma

Like the famous Dutch painter and my relative Jopie Huisman I am well known in my native country for my highly detailed works of art. My hyper-realist paintings are about everyday situations people encounter in modern city landscapes.

I registrate common people on the streets, in public transport, in stores, waiting rooms, museums or just show the surroundings people are living in. Because these situations are often gone in a second I take pictures of them, which I later use as a starting point for my realist paintings.

The paintings tempt to stand still at things that are usually not observed. The loneliness of some people, the lack of communication between people, how people retire within oneself while waiting or just the surroundings we encounter everyday. A moment in modern urban living with all the distortion that comes with it. And then it's obvious that the situations usually don't observed say a whole lot about todays society.

I've studied painting and fine art at the School of Arts Minerva in the Netherlands, specializing in meticulous form drawing and realistic painting. I've been painting professionally fulltime since my graduation in 2001 and exhibited all over my native country and abroad.

In 2003 the most influential museum in my region, the Fries Museum, decided to add my work to their permanent collection. They also showed my work twice already. In the same year I won the public prize of the Vredeman de Vries Vormgevings Award for the project Emma. In 2004 and 2005 I was the recipient of a scholarship by Fonds BKVB, the scholarship for the most promising emerging artists from the Netherlands.

There is a growing interest from abroad ever since. Paintings were shown in New York, Florence and Amsterdam amongst countless other cities. Not only is my work represented in major collections in American cities like New York, Los Angelos, San Francisco, Chigago and Washington DC, but also in European cities like Amsterdam, Napels, Rome and München to name just a few.