Henk Pander

"My paintings reflect personal experience, giving form to events I have witnessed throughout my life, where individual experience meets historical time. In an attempt to make visual sense out of contemporary dilemma, I deal with issues such as the passage of time, entropy and loss, in the form of memories of war and childhood, portraits involving aging and personal history, vanitas still lifes, and technology versus the natural world…"

Like all great requiems, Henk Pander’s paintings reveal that the fragile beauty of life is most poignant in the context of devastation and death. His virtuosic compositions involve the grave sites of wrecked airplanes and ships, the ruins of the Twin Towers, bodies decayed and ravaged by age and disease, contemporary vanitas still lifes, dramatic narratives of war, and scattered letters of lovers long gone…

Preparing Galileo

Henk Pander is a brilliant painter who has played a critical role in Portland’s artistic community over a span of forty years…

The derelict atmosphere in Pander’s new paintings is constructed by an amalgam of socio-political commentaries, lush painted surfaces and immaculate technique, which evoke memory, loss and neglect. Images of the destruction surrounding a plane crash, the fragility of life, degrading interiors and modern day landscapes attest to a postindustrial age of corrosion and deterioration that has settled into itself…