Berry Brugman - Z.T. Water landscape, pasty and abstract - Sold

Typical work by Berry Brugman, painted in the early 1970s. Thick paint (pasty), wild and expressionistic.
The painting has been cleaned and the frame has been repaired and painted.
Berry Brugman (Almelo, September 25, 1915 – Almelo, October 11, 1996) was a Dutch painter, draftsman, sculptor and watercolorist.
Life and work

Berry Brugman was born in Almelo in 1915. After high school he went to the art academy in Arnhem; he took his final exams in 1940.

During the war, Brugman fought in the battle for Grebbeberg and was in the Amersfoort concentration camp. Afterwards (1942) he left for Amsterdam to further his skills in portrait and model painting with Jos Rovers. He also wanted to experience, together with other painters, how contemporary art of that time developed. Mastery of the profession was essential for him.

In 1943 he married Janny Brugman-de Vries (Sneek, October 28, 1918 - Almelo, March 16, 2006). Janny was a Dutch sculptress. She made statues, sculptures and mosaics for various parks and buildings.

Forced by war circumstances, Berry returned to Almelo and established himself there as a painter and joined the De Twentsche Kunstkring. After the liberation he made study trips to France, England, Italy, Canada and Germany, among others. In 1973 he became a member of the Amsterdam Artists' Association De Stuwing.

In 1984 he and his wife received the Johanna van Buren Cultural Prize from the Johanna van Buren Foundation in Hellendoorn.[1]

Berry Brugman was an expressionist and strove for figurative forms, his work touched on the abstract, but it never became completely abstract. Color was very important in his work. His deepest source of inspiration was the nature of Twente. He belonged to expressionists such as Constant Permeke (School of Sint-Martens-Latem), Charley Toorop (Bergense School), Hendrik Werkman (Groningse Ploeg), Hendrik Chabot (Artists Group R 33) and Charles Eyck (Limburg School). In addition, Berry Brugman naturally had a deeply religious disposition. He was therefore a religious, socially committed painter in which the existential suffering of man was personified for him by the suffering of Christ; another source of inspiration. His subjects were: seasons, landscapes, figures, portraits, religion, war, famine and flower still lifes.