Chris Berens

Chris Berens
Chris Berens in his studio in Amsterdam
Born	June 19, 1976 Oss, Netherlands
Nationality	Dutch
Education
Known for	Painter
Notable work	Circle of Friends On a Midnight Voyage The Departure Utopiary

Chris Berens (born June 19, 1976) is a Dutch painter. While he takes inspiration from the quality of light in the paintings of Vermeer and Rembrandt, his themes lie more within the realms of surrealism and visionary art than traditional painting. Although his work is completely hand-painted, his paintings are often assumed to be digital photographic manipulation. He lives in Amsterdam with his wife Esther and their daughters Emma & Juno Leeuwenhart.

Chris Berens was born in 1976 in Oss, Netherlands, near the historic town of 's-Hertogenbosch, the birthplace of Hieronymous Bosch, a factor that would feature in his artistic development. When he was a boy, his father brought him to many exhibitions of the Dutch Golden Age painters, including Frans Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer, and those images became infused into the internal world he began imagining as a child. He studied illustration at the in Den Bosch, graduating in 1999. While working as a freelance illustrator, Berens began to teach himself to paint in several dilapidated buildings in the rural area near his childhood home. Attempting to emulate the painting methods of the Old Masters and 19th-century academic artists like Ingres and Bouguereau, he learned by copying their work, and eventually came upon a technique which allowed him to achieve an otherwordly dreamlike impression of the qualities he admired in his predecessors. More recently, Berens relocated to Amsterdam, where he began exhibiting his work in 2004. After four sold-out shows at Amsterdam's Jaski Gallery, Berens made the move to infiltrate the American art market in 2008, at Seattle's well-known pop surrealism gallery, Roq la Rue. That sold-out show was his first exposure to American collectors, and the sudden appearance of an artist exhibiting his technical sophistication and evocative dreamlike motifs caused a sensation in pop surrealism circles. In 2009, he had his first museum retrospective, in which 13 of his paintings were exhibited at the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch. In 2010, Berens was commissioned to create the cover for Blondie's album Panic of Girls. He also supplied the artwork for German singer Xavier Naidoo's 2009 album Alles kann besser werden, which features a painting called "The Big Blue."