Peter Verboom

Biography:

Born in Rotterdam, Year 1954.

I always was a visualizing drawing kid. 

At the age of 18 starting a study for a psychiatric nursery in Assen. This 3-year period permanently influenced my view on humanity. 

Nothing is what it seems any longer. After this period my imagination embraced absurdity and alienation. Not much later I became a freelance illustrator with a cartoonish slant. In my design, I kept looking for the witticism. The same witticism, but now in combination with ‘playing’, became a reality on a larger scale with my first ‘happening’ and coming out as a conceptual artist.

The happening was called ”Thunderclap1992″. An orchestrated creative outburst full of childlike joy in the public space of Assen.

In the dark of the night, two hundred and fifty participants imitated a thunderstorm with 250 rolling empty wheelie bins and 250 photo flash devices. 

(Rolling, stop, flashing, rolling, stop etc.) Flag Instructions from a leading Landrover.

Community spirit at its best… a revelation!

The next one, “Twilight lamp1997” followed, a big group therapy session for 65 standing upholstered lamps (together with their owners) on the Brink in Assen. The lamps got a motivating speech to survive in halogen light land and an upholstered lamp-video clip was offered for their entertainment. 

Then for a year, I got the ‘city artistry’ of the town of Assen in the northern part of Holland. In that year I could manifest myself as a ‘homo ludens’ in public space. With a quest for childlike spontaneity.

This quest never ended. Not as a designer, not as a community artist or later as a teacher in art at the University of Applied Sciences, Department of Education.

Artist statement:

Motto: Humanity perishes by not playing

In my current work, I use the wreckage of our mass consumption and process it into ‘assemblages’. 

I prefer to use non-traditional art materials, mainly used everyday attributes.

My ‘objects trouvés’ are collected in thrift stores.

In my process of designing emerges a play between the visual language in my intuitive ‘heart’ and cognitive mind. 

My play with existing forms and shapes, their contrasts, their mutual relations,  also in material and color, starts in me while I’m ‘on the hunt’ in thrift stores. Parallel during this ‘hunt’ the artifacts transmit their symbolic values ​​to me. 

Back in my studio, the play continues in which I struggle with my visual language of statically or dynamic appearances, the mutual volumes and compositions of objects or parts of them, their structures and surfaces, and their mutual ranking. Finally generates the resulting whole, with different usage histories of the individual attributes, and question marks in a new mutual relationship. Irrational alienated combinations give birth to the narrative aspect of my work.

I get inspiration from the work of Magritte, Arman, Spoerri, Duchamp, ‘Nouveau Realism’, and the ‘Arte Povera’ in the 60s and 70s of the last century.