herman de vries
to be
Two words. A verb. A beginning.
To be simply means to be. To be there. To be present.
This thought is ever-present in the work of herman de vries. A stone is there. A leaf is there. Earth is there. Water is there. A human being is there. None of them asks to be explained.
herman de vries does not seek to describe the world. He brings it closer. What is found is not necessarily altered; what is already there is given space to be seen. Nature appears not as representation, but as reality — and as something of which we ourselves are a part.
To be also embodies a non-hierarchical way of thinking. Human being, plant, stone, earth and water share the same simple condition: they are there. Not because they are first given meaning, but simply because they are.
From to be, other works also come into focus. Text, found materials, earth, plants, traces and simple actions do not need to explain one another. They can exist alongside each other. It is precisely in the space between them that something becomes visible.
We are accustomed to naming, ordering and assigning meaning. The work of herman de vries asks us to let this go and simply look at what is there.
herman de vries is now 95 years old. Throughout his long artistic career, he has returned again and again to something elemental: being, looking, observing.
herman de vries (Alkmaar, 1931) has spent more than six decades developing a body of work in which art, science and philosophy come together. Trained as a biologist and researcher, he developed a practice rooted in close attention to natural processes, chance and observation. As a member of the Dutch NUL group and the international ZERO movement, he developed in the 1960s an artistic practice in which reality itself became the point of departure.
From the 1970s onwards, earth, plants, stones and other found natural materials became central to his work. In 2015, herman de vries represented the Netherlands at the 56th Venice Biennale with to be all ways to be. His work is held in leading museum collections worldwide. In 2025, he was appointed Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion, the Netherlands’ highest civilian honour.