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Siep van den Berg

Siep van den Berg was born in Southwest Friesland, Netherlands, in 1913. He died in Amsterdam in 1998.
He was a painter and sculptor.

Siep van den Berg studied at the Minerva Academy in Groningen (NL) and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. As a sculptor, he was self-taught.

He decided to become a professional painter in 1939, and rented Sterrebos' tea dome (Groningen) for this purpose. Around this time, he mainly painted landscapes and still lives.

His main inspirations then included his father-in-law Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman, and artists from Groningen's modern art scene, such as the collective De Ploeg.

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However, his style and influences changed when he moved to the west of Netherlands. From the late 1960s, he stopped working from nature in favor of simplified and stylized abstract compositions — a shift he described as getting further away from nature and going even more into fantasy.

The painter started to divide his compositions into overlapping geometric shapes : squares, rectangles of primary colors reminiscent of Mondrian and De Stijl.

 

Siep van den Berg's became one of the few Dutch painters to make a name for themselves in the post-war constructivist movement.