Water Works — Terra Nova

This summer, from 12 June to 5 September 2010, Kunsthal Rotterdam presents over eighty works by painter and lithographer Jeroen Hermkens (1960). From January 2009 onwards Hermkens travelled around the world for one and a half years in order to register the activities of dredging company Van Oord based in Rotterdam. Painting with powerful strokes of the brush and using only subtle colours, Hermkens manages to portray various domains within the robust reality of hydraulic engineering. His expressive paintings, lithographs and pen drawings represent the activities of excavators and dredgers, hoisting cranes and numerous ships and pontoons in a world of stone and steel, sand and water. A large wall painting by Hermkens, which is 25 metres long and 6 metres high, is also shown at the exhibition.