BEN AKKERMAN, ENSCHEDE, THE NETHERLANDS, 1920 - ENSCHEDE, THE NETHERLANDS, 2010.
AKKERMAN IS REPRESENTED BY BORZO GALLERY, AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS.
As a teenager AKKERMAN discovered his passion for painting, a pursuit he practised as a self-taught artist while working as a municipal employee. It was not until his retirement in 1982 that he could fully devote himself to his art, though his practice had already gained a professional and serious dimension by the 1950s.
Akkerman’s artistic career began with faithful depictions of the Twente countryside, capturing the fields, watermills, and farmhouses in his surroundings. He drew inspiration from the works of 17th-century masters such as Jan van Goyen and Jacob van Ruisdael, whose paintings he admired at Rijksmuseum Twenthe. Yet Akkerman was not striving for a literal representation of the landscape. As he once stated in a wall text at the Van Abbemuseum: “I didn't want any reminder in my work of a windy day or a rainy afternoon. I wanted to make a new image.” Instead, his focus was on the structure and atmosphere of the landscape — a theme he would never abandon, even as his work gradually became more abstract from the 1950s onwards.
The true shift towards abstraction occurred in 1973, the year of his first solo museum exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Recognisable elements of the landscape gave way to lines, planes and colours, through which Akkerman sought to capture the essence of light, space and atmosphere. By this point, the landscape had become a faint echo within his work.
Although Akkerman’s art is often associated with fundamental painting, NUL/Zero, and minimal art, he always remained an outsider. His inspiration came not from defined movements, but rather from nature and the act of painting itself. Nevertheless, in 1946, he co-founded the artists’ collective De Nieuwe Groep ('The New Group'), which aimed to promote modern art from the eastern part of the Netherlands.
Akkerman’s output was remarkably low: he completed only five to six paintings each year, often after months of painstaking revisions, sanding and repainting — a testament to his almost ascetic dedication. Each painting represents a meticulous search for balance, where paint, colour and form harmonise seamlessly. At the same time, small imperfections render his work approachable and human. Not every painting survived his stringent self-criticism; many were destroyed if they failed to meet his exacting standards. What remains is an oeuvre of approximately 150 paintings and hundreds of drawings, much of which is now housed in museum collections. For instance, Kunstmuseum Den Haag holds no fewer than 167 of his works, while Rijksmuseum Twenthe owns nearly 80.
Ben Akkerman passed away on 2 February 2010 at the age of 89. His works are held in the collections of various museums, including Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Museum Of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum Voorlinden, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Van Abbemuseum, the Fries Museum, the Groninger Museum, the Centraal Museum, the Bonnefantenmuseum, the Frans Hals Museum and Rijksmuseum Twenthe.
