Rudi Bierman

Rudi Bierman. Oil on hardboard. "The Pinball" 92x122cm.

Rudi Bierman (Batavia, December 27, 1921 - Amsterdam, November 19, 1972) was a Dutch neo-expressionist artist. Bierman studied at the Institute for Applied Arts Education and from 1946 to 1950 at the Rijksakademie van visual arts in Amsterdam, where he was one of the students of Gé Röling and Heinrich Campendonk, among others. The meeting with the expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka during a summer academy course in Salzburg (Schule des Sehens) had a great influence on his development as an artist. In addition to other dominant art movements, Bierman tried to pave his own way and thereby developed his own handwriting. His starting point was a figurative expressionism, as a result of which his work gives the impression of always balancing between abstraction and figuration. As a teacher (from 1964) at the Minerva Academy in Groningen, he influenced the formation of a younger generation of Groningen painters. In 1950 he was awarded the Royal Grant for Painting.