Gerdi Bouws (Amsterdam, 1951) - RARE

Beautiful color etching in low edition! Gerdi Bouws, born in 1951, was particularly influenced by the characteristic cultural milieu of the 1970s. The art sphere of the 1970s was characterized by a desire to develop and strengthen oneself, in response to the many conflicts of the previous decade. One of the most central currents of the 1970s was conceptualism, which emerged as an offshoot of minimalism, while the experimental, creative journey of process art became a reality by combining essential aspects of conceptualism with further reflections on art itself. The original ideas of environmentalism came from Land Art, which brought art to the earth itself, shaped the land, and brought art outside. For the first time since the demise of Abstract Expressionism, expressive figure painting slowly regained its prominence, mainly in Germany through the work of the acclaimed figures Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. The city of New York remained the most prominent artistic center of the decade, with artists from all over the world wandering downtown and frequenting bars and art galleries, reinforcing the idea of New York City as a cosmopolitan and sophisticated cultural capital. In the eastern part of the world, Japanese and Korean artists with a strong interest in the European ideas of phenomenology joined the Mono-Ha movement, exploring and pushing the boundaries between natural and industrial materials. Using stone, glass, cotton, sponge, wood, oil and water, they wanted to bring to life works of art that would highlight the ephemeral state of these different elements and their surroundings, playing with their interdependence.