Old cultures are dying III, 1990

Hans Luiken attended the Academy St. Joost in Breda. After a long “hyperrealist” period, often mixed with surrealist elements, he now has been particularly fascinated by the atmosphere and structures of past glory: peeling walls, crumpled paper, dented zinc sheets and the like he often manages to paint photographically aptly, so much so that one sometimes tends to feel whether or not the crumpled paper is really crumpled paper, or whether it is tightly stretched canvas painted with acrylic paint.

Sometimes in the painted weathered surface textures one again vaguely discovers a human portrait. Thus demonstrating his belief in the cycle and continuity of life. Especially the human being, usually not painted after a concrete example, but rather as an image of a human being created from memory, as the most obvious product of nature, and especially the expression of the human face is a theme that regularly recurs in Hans Luiken’s oeuvre.