Henk Zweerus: A box of blocks unwrapped with ingenuity!

I never noticed it before when I was cycling along the Leidsebosje… Amsterdam's first abstract sculpture ‘Horizontal Composition’ made by Henk Zweerus (1920-2005) in 1957.

My attention was always attracted to a so-called ‘wild sculpture’, the blue Boomzagertje (Sawyer) on a tree branch. 'Wild' because it was placed as 'urban tree art'without the local goverment's permission and made by an anonymous artist. It had the 'classic' representation of a male figure seated on a branch on which he sits sawing himself off with a saw. Thus his downfall is unsuspecting.

But the sandstone sculpture displayed under this old sycamore is much more interesting… but I didn’t know that yet. Today the sculpture is still there – a little bit as an orphan work but still present.

 
_{'Horizontale Compositie' by Henk Zweerus along the Leidsebosje, Amsterdam}

I have never noticed the statue in front of the Amsterdam Lyceum on the Valeriusplein placed in 1960. Only forty years later I saw it for the first time. From a distance you are struck by the beautifully composed ‘Vertical structure’. The background with houses, trees and city bustle shows the sculpture at its best with its intensity, systematic approach and perfectionism of the artist. The pillar is not made out of natural stone but out of a mould shaped exposed concrete. This abstract totem is made in a period in which Zweerus made his fist drawings for his series which he later - in the 1960s- named  ‘statuettes’.

_{'Verticale structuur' by Henk Zweerus on the Valeriusplein, Amsterdam}

Although, after the war, more and more commissions for monuments in the public spaces of Dutch cities were given, the sculptor Zweerus didn’t receive that much commissions. After his academic time he decided to work no longer on the model and nature. To earn his living he draws with the artist Constant the Canadian soldiers who frequented the cafés of Amsterdam. It was also Constant who brings him into contact with Karel Appel and Corneille, but although the principles of the movement fascinate him, he never became a real Cobra man. He does, however, remain part of his Bergen friends club, including, among others, Friso ten Holt, Jaap Min, Constant and Gerrit and David Kouwenaar.

 
_{'Statuette' by Henk Zweerus available at Kunsthandel Bert Kuipers}

Zweerus financially gets better when he is asked to become a teacher at the newly established AKI in Enschede. From 1950 to 1955 he is a teacher of 'vormstudies’ under primitive circumstances. The later ‘city sculptor of Enschede’, Gooitzen de Jong, is one of his students. Together with his fellow lecturers Aldo van Eyck, Joop Hardy and Wim Brusse, he spurs weekly to the textile city. In 1954 he made the wall sculpture 'Watching and listening' on behalf of the theater. The statue now hangs, rescued from the bronze kiln and after some wanderings, on a wall in the sculpture garden of Castle ‘t Nijenhuis near Heino, nowadays a part of the Museum de Fundatie.

_{'Watching and listening' at Museum De Fundatie, 't Nijenhuis near Heino}

Zweerus' educational career continues through the IvKNO, the later Rietveld Academy, to Delft University of Technology, where he has been for more than twenty years a lecturer in ‘vormstudies’ at the Department of Architecture. Well-known architects such as Carl Weeber, Jan Benthem and Pi de Bruijn, who supervised the reconstruction of Roombeek in Enschede after the fireworks disaster in 2000, are students from Zweerus. Weeber, who according to Pi de Bruijn always got high marks, remembers: “Zweerus was frugal with words, that worked enchantingly. During the exercises in Delft he came out of his studio, walked around our workpieces, put on his round black hat, measured his proportions with his hands and fingers, tapped the weakest part with his index finger, nodded and walked on. For us enough to see where the exact pain was."

_{'No Title' by Henk Zweerus in 1956}

The permanent appointment, sealed by royal decree, enables Zweerus to work on a serial 'rectangular form research' every day in his own studio that is close to the classrooms. Sketches he made in his Amsterdam period and that form the basis of the sculptures on the Valeriusplein and in the Leidsebosje serve as the starting point for this research, which will last ten years. “An real obsession!”, according to one of his colleagues from Delft.

_{Sketches by Henk Zweerus}

Impressive and completely detached from the Liga Nieuwe Beelden, from Constant and his Nieuw Babylon, to Joost Baljeu and André Volten with their Style-derived constructivism and other cubistic space explorations, Zweerus tries to find a synthesisin his works like his master Bronner did with sculptures and architecture. This materializes in more than seventy rhythmic variations in water glass paint coated concrete, composed according to idiosyncratic ordering principles. According to his own words, he entered a path 'to explore an area aside from the main traffic'. The architectural 'main traffic' moves in those years mainly in the regions of the soulless reconstruction, according to the act normal or down-to-earth principle.

'Keine Experimente!', statesman and chancellor Konrad Adenauer even calls in Germany.

_{Henk Zweerus in his workshop} 

When you are walking in the Zuidas in Amsterdam or coming from the Leuvehaven over the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam, or look at the buildings in the rebuilt firework disaster area of Enschede, the architectonic tribute to the daring form studies of Henk Zweerus immediately shows. Did Henk Zweerus inspire for example Rem Koolhaas with his buidling?

For years, the largest part of his 'statuettes' are in a basement of the former AKZO building in Arnhem. Some of these statuettes are hidden elsewhere in the country between bushes, such as in museum Kranenbugh in Bergen, to notice for those who have an eye for it. Six of these have recently been exhibited in Doorwerth Castle. Twenty of these concrete statues have two Manhattens built, small conglomerates of eighty centimeters tall skyscrapers. This results in a rhythmic ornamental design, both per copy and per number together.

_{Rotterdam area around the Erasmus Bridge with De Rotterdam building by Rem Koolhaas}

This result of a box of blocks unwrapped with ingenuity, together with the architectural sketches and a selection from the thousands of drawings (including a tower of Babel six meters high that Zweerus made in his later years) can be seen and bought at Bert Kuipers Kunsthandel at the Lonnekerspoorlaan 104 in Roombeek and at Van Jeugd Architects, Nieuwe Schoolweg 4 in Enschede.

The drawings and gouaches that have never been exhibited show that Henk Zweerus had an almost inexhaustible abstract idiom in his creations.

The exhibition is a reference to the architecture of today and to the images that are still in the public spaces. It shows that this artisanal and idiosyncratic artist was far ahead of his time. His work is the trait d'union between image and building in the Netherlands.