Hieron Pessers

Hieron Pessers was a multitalent. After a successful career in fashion he decided to pursue an early ambition: that of becoming a painter of monumental figurative paintings at a time when conceptual art was dominant. His idiosyncratic paintings initially evoke associations with the magic realistic tricultural sources dition, in Holland represented by painters like Charley Toorop and Pyke Koch. Even a peremptory look at the ‘lyrical and tragic canvases’ (as Pessers himself used to call them) reveals how they draw on a wide variety of sources: Commedia del Arte, Goethe, Goya, Mozart, Fellini, Teresa de Lempicka, Donald Duck, Billy Holiday..

His canvases – often huge and elaborately framed – visualize a world entirely his own, one that is often funny but also unsettling: ‘making merry on the edge of the precipice..’