Henrike Scholten is a visual artist and historian of artistic technique from The Netherlands.
Visual work:
In my artistic practice I work mostly in color pencil on paper. My work investigates drawing as a process: I’m interested in processes of mark-making, constructing, observing and rendering. My recent work uses seventeenth-century visual culture as a starting point, combined with abstraction and improvisation, observations from real life, and pictorial clichés. The drawings refer to decorative and artistic printed materials, but also to the maps and board games that were commonly available in the form of prints. By reinterpreting historical images using modern materials and visual strategies, my drawings interrogate the visual conventions that shape the way we perceive images as representational. Doing so, my works add an ironic and anti-hierarchical layer to art history.
Research:
In addition to my artistic practice, I am a PhD candidate in the ERC-funded project DURARE (Dynamics of the Durable: A History of Making Things Last in the Visual and Decorative Arts). My dissertation within DURARE examines material and cultural aspects to artistic durability in the long seventeenth century, based on a corpus of art-technical written sources. My project is about the materials and techniques of watercolor painting. In this project I use a blended method of art historical and hands-on historical reconstruction research.
I graduated from Minerva Art Academy in Fine Art in 2011 and have since then worked and exhibited in the Netherlands and abroad. In 2020 I graduated from University of Groningen’s research master in Arts & Cultural Studies (Art History track, cum laude). I have developed and taught various elective courses at the art academy, and have given many guest lectures, technical workshops and interactive artistic workshops. My research interests include drawing, materiality, the teaching and learning of technique, as well as the influence of social aspects like class, gender and age on artistic practices. My research previously centered on the drawing albums from 1696 of Hendrick van Beaumont (1687-1707), a previously unknown draughtsman (publication TBA).
Visual work:
In my artistic practice I work mostly in color pencil on paper. My work investigates drawing as a process: I’m interested in processes of mark-making, constructing, observing and rendering. My recent work uses seventeenth-century visual culture as a starting point, combined with abstraction and improvisation, observations from real life, and pictorial clichés. The drawings refer to decorative and artistic printed materials, but also to the maps and board games that were commonly available in the form of prints. By reinterpreting historical images using modern materials and visual strategies, my drawings interrogate the visual conventions that shape the way we perceive images as representational. Doing so, my works add an ironic and anti-hierarchical layer to art history.
Research:
In addition to my artistic practice, I am a PhD candidate in the ERC-funded project DURARE (Dynamics of the Durable: A History of Making Things Last in the Visual and Decorative Arts). My dissertation within DURARE examines material and cultural aspects to artistic durability in the long seventeenth century, based on a corpus of art-technical written sources. My project is about the materials and techniques of watercolor painting. In this project I use a blended method of art historical and hands-on historical reconstruction research.
I graduated from Minerva Art Academy in Fine Art in 2011 and have since then worked and exhibited in the Netherlands and abroad. In 2020 I graduated from University of Groningen’s research master in Arts & Cultural Studies (Art History track, cum laude). I have developed and taught various elective courses at the art academy, and have given many guest lectures, technical workshops and interactive artistic workshops. My research interests include drawing, materiality, the teaching and learning of technique, as well as the influence of social aspects like class, gender and age on artistic practices. My research previously centered on the drawing albums from 1696 of Hendrick van Beaumont (1687-1707), a previously unknown draughtsman (publication TBA).