.... ‘I experience looking as a source of knowledge. Looking is for me a physical experience, from the way it travels I become aware of my state of being.
I am fascinated by the process of creation itself, it makes me wonder from which frequency works of art are made, which energies are involved, but also which layers they address in the receiver.
How to listen to the work itself and how to bridge your inner being to what your hands are showing are central aspects in my teaching.
How can it bring us closer to all the dimensions within our possibilities? How to balance your autobiography in a bigger picture of art? What can art do?
Art has the unique ability to transmit power. It is in this quality that it functions in a larger context. The resonance of art opens up in unexpected ways and creates more impact than we think’….
Elly Strik is living and working in Brussels and started teaching at the age of twenty-five. She studied herself at Academy Minerva in Groningen and Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht.
She is specialized in making works on paper, mostly realized through materials as graphite, pigment, oil paint, but also with ash from her wood stove and silver and gold leaf to achieve the right alchemy. For her, the possibilities of metamorphosis lie at the basis of our being. Her search for the essence of man brings together a poetic and at the same time radical visual language.
Elly Strik has had solo exhibitions in M HKA, Antwerp (B, 1999); De Pont, Tilburg (NL, 2006); Van AbbeMuseum, Eindhoven (NL, 2006); Kunsthalle Mainz (DE, 2012); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (ES, 2014) and 1700 La Poste, Montreal (CA, 2018).
Her work was awarded with: Philip Morris award, Charlotte Köhler price, Jeanne Oosting price.