Dick Berckenkamp

Dick Berckenkamp (1955) – The Visualization of the Intangible

Dick Berckenkamp dedicates his artistic work to the challenge of making fleeting phenomena such as time, sound, and movement permanently tangible in a static medium. He established a solid artistic foundation during his studies at the Willem de Kooning Academie and at Codarts. His work is a search for emotional resonances located at the intersection of painting, dance, and music. Stylistically, he moves between lyrical abstraction, expressive figuration, and modern post-abstraction.

In the Beyond Words series, painting becomes a record of internal states. In works like Waiting or Whispering, Berckenkamp captures moments of pause or delicate acoustic stimuli and translates them into a psychological landscape. Similar to the late work of Martha Jungwirth, movement here arises from intuitive, somatic placements that create a visceral intensity between graphic tension and biomorphic eruptions of color.

The Composition series is dedicated to the transformation of physicality as well as interpersonal vibrations and sounds. It succeeds in making the inaudible and invisible experienceable through color and form. In works such as Let’s dance or Heroes, Berckenkamp uses striking contour lines to mark movement sequences and emotional zones of encounter. The deformation serves particularly as a rhythmic, vital dynamic. Thus, the painting functions as a resonance space for feelings that elude precise naming and go directly under the skin as a collective “goosebump moment” beyond the visible.

With Radio Spritz, Berckenkamp radicalizes the dialogue between impulse and structure by working on the canvas lying flat from all sides. Painting is consistently defined here as pure movement and the “sampling” of visual information. Acrylic and spray paint combine to create spraying rhythms and crossing signals that resemble the vibration displays of a radio. Firmly anchored stylistically in post-abstraction, these visual scores represent what is actually invisible to the eye.

Berckenkamp’s work, which has been exhibited e.g. at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (group exhibition Troost, 2021/2022), the Amare Theater in The Hague (Switch, 2023), Fort Sabina, Willemstad (You Are Here, 2015), and the Galerie de 7e Hemel in Bussum (2014), is an invitation to explore the world behind the visible—where colors become sounds, contours become feelings, and static canvases become living energy fields.