Dutch · b. 1955, lives Amsterdam · Sculpture

Pieter Vos

Pieter Vos was born in Rotterdam in 1955 and has worked in Amsterdam since the late 1970s. His sculpture occupies the narrow ground between minimalism and the figure, casting fragments of the body — a torso, a folded limb, a shoulder, a head laid on its side — alongside spare architectural forms such as a slab, a step or a lintel. He works in concrete, plaster and lead, the materials chosen for their weight and their refusal of ornament. Surfaces are left raw and unpolished; the seam of the mould is rarely removed, kept as a record of how the object came into being. Vos casts from life and from architecture in equal measure, treating a clavicle and a doorway as comparable units of mass. The result is quiet, dense and frontal, shown low on plinths or directly on the floor. Over four decades his work has entered major Dutch collections and has been shown across Europe, where it is valued for its restraint and its rigour. Vos rarely titles a piece beyond what it depicts. He continues to cast and to teach in Amsterdam, working slowly and in small editions.

I cast what is left when a body is taken apart and set down. The seam stays because the mould is part of the thing, not a flaw to be sanded away. Weight does the speaking; I try to add nothing to it.

Selected exhibitions

1988Cast and Fragment · Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam · group
1991Pieter Vos: Floor Works · De Pont, Tilburg · solo
1994Weight and Seam · Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo · solo
1998The Architectural Body · Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht · group
2001Lintel, Step, Slab · Henry Moore Institute, Leeds · solo
2004Northern Material · Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel · group
2008Pieter Vos: Lead · Brunner & Sand, Zürich · solo
2011Open Field · Skulptur Projekte, Münster · group
2014The Quiet Object · Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam · group
2017Fragments · Brunner & Sand, Zürich · solo
2020Cast in Grey · Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague · solo
2022Winter Sculpture · Brunner & Sand, St. Moritz · group
2024Mass · Gemeentemuseum Helmond, Helmond · solo
2026The Mould and the Body · Brunner & Sand, Zürich · solo

Selected collections

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
De Pont, Tilburg
Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel

Education

1974Sculpture, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam
1979Postgraduate fellowship, De Ateliers, Amsterdam

Awards

1996Wilhelmina Prize for Sculpture, Royal Award for Painting Foundation
2013Charlotte Köhler Prize, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds

Works

15 works · enquiries welcome