Hidde van Schie
Hidde van Schie’s efforts to escape the mundane within the arts appears limitless. Having graduated as a painter from Willem de Kooning academy in 2001, he has also veered into various mediums such as drawings, collages, sculptures and even music. His works seem to deal with the wild, just existing outside of the periphery of reality.
His body of paintings collectively appear to assemble a microcosm untouched by order; everything is a little too large, a little too colourful and a little too untamed to be of this world.
The series of figures, sans features, flat against their background, are juxtaposed with the few discernable characters of hairy giants, skeletons and ominous fluorescent birds. His more abstract work is equally part of this atmosphere but also epitomises a sense of fluidity which the medium of painting lends itself perfectly to. Various flora, tendrils, seaweed, it evokes the sense of density and mystery a jungle has.
Nevertheless, this freedom from the colloquial is not limited to creating the fantastical, but rather shows van Schie’s perceptiveness for uncanny features. This is perhaps most evident in his series Welcome to Zoom created over the period of 2019 - 2021. The series comprised of 80 drawings demonstrates the artists understandable fixation with the overwhelming visualised through the sea of faces which felt so bodiless during lockdown.
Hidde van Schie (b. 1978) lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
