Description
Damsté (1944) studied from 1962 to 1970 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Arnhem, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in ‘s-Hertogenbosch and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. He taught at the art academies of The Hague, Arnhem and Amersfoort from 1972 to 2005. He was a guest lecturer at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf in 1987 and 1989. He lives and works in Arnhem. Works (selection) In the year of opening, 40 landscape paintings by Damsté from the Van der Grinten collection were exhibited in Museum Schloss Moyland. A few sculptures were placed along the Kunstwegen sculpture route in Frenswegen near Nordhorn in the state of Lower Saxony. In 2006, the Print Room of the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels acquired a large collection of silkscreens, lithographs, woodcuts and aquatint etchings by the artist, providing a complete overview of his oeuvre. Damsté’s work is in the collections of the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, the Frans Masereel Centre in Kasterlee, the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam and the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam.
His teachers are Jurjen de Haan, Peter Struycken and Henk Peeters. The latter was part of the Nul movement. From the mid-1960s, Damsté also found a connection with the ideas of this, and the international Zero, movement. Damsté shifts and arranges his images until the total has a coherent composition, whether this is on paper, in wood, steel or marble. In this he searches for a repetitive rhythm, one of the main characteristics of the Nul movement.
The contrasting elements, which are a rhythmic given in most of his drawings, arise randomly through the working process, fatigue of the hand, which results in lighter stamping, or the ink running out. These are all factors that do not deliberately determine the nuance. In this way, a large space remains open for the playful element. This early ink drawing is a beautiful exemple of this Zero-inspired serial work. In very good condition, 50×70, signed two times vertically and horizontally, chr paul damsté 1968.
