Hans Kanters Dutch, 1947

Hans Kanters was born in Amsterdam in 1947, and has been making paintings

since 1967, lithographs since 1986 and sculptures since 1994. An autodidact,

he has lived and worked in the Netherlands, southern Spain, Formentera,

southern France and Ibiza.

Exhibitions and collections

Hans Kanters has had exhibitions in the Netherlands, Belgium, France,

Germany, Switzerland, Spain, the United States and Japan in galleries

and art fairs. His work is in collections in these same countries.

In the Museum Jan van der Togt in Amstelveen is a permanent collection

 of paintings of Hans Kanters. In this museum he had a solo exhibition

from November 29, 2012 till January 13, 2013.

About his work

"People ought to be able to get more out of it than I put into it,

otherwise I have been doing something wrong. It is not just about the meaning,

 it is the emotion, humour and irony, tenderness and frustration,

even rage that I am trying to convey."
There is no way to describe Kanters' work in a couple of sentences.

What you can say is that the bizarre, fascinating paintings with their dozens of

details depict life in all its facets of emotion, behaviour and social customs.

And at an amazingly skilled technical level.

As an autodidact, for decades Kanters has been doing things his own way

without paying the least bit of attention to trends or fashion,

he simply is who he is. After his erotic period in the 1970s, surrealism has been

dominant in his work since the 1980s and his palette has become more direct,

the colours less dense. In addition to his graphic work such as lithographs

and etchings, ever since 1994 he has also been making bronze statues.