Elly Strik
(The Hague,
1961 )
Elly Strik works mostly in subdued colours with graphite, coloured pencil, oil and enamel paint. In mainly large format works on paper, she attempts to capture fragmented and layered identity and offer a broader perspective on the psychological essence of being human. Photographs serve as an objectified starting point, but the subsequent process is highly personal and intense. Strik mixes images or superimposes them, conceals or removes parts, or metamorphoses them. In a continuous game of attraction and repulsion, she often combines opposing elements: the masculine and the feminine, the earthly and the cosmic, the intuitive and the conscious. The result, a synthesis of Strik’s dreams and demons, is at once conciliatory and confrontational, intimate and ecstatic. In 1999, Elly Strik had a retrospective at the Antwerp M HKA and in 2014 a major solo exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.
