Rick Beerhorst

b. 1960, Grand Rapids, MI

Born in 1960 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Rick Beerhorst grew up in an evangelical community in this town of the American Midwest. A religious education which conditioned the mystical quest that he expresses in his paintings.

To escape a tormented family environment, the young boy had set up a workshop in the basement of the house, like a protective bubble that allowed him to escape through creation. Fascinated by creatures of all kinds, he would get lost in nature to draw animals. Another gateway from reality, television shows of the 1970s that he binge-watched, are perceptible references in his art.

The young Rick had taken his artist uncle as a model: art was a possible horizon, a possible perspective. While at university, Beerhorst quickly turned away from his architectural studies to pursue visual arts studies at a school in New York. It was a revelation: the New York artist’s life was his and the artistic faun of SoHo adopted him right away.

Rick Beerhorst’s painting finds affinities with the movements of Art Brut and Naïve Art. An inspired outsider, he devoted his career as a painter to the search for a universal spirituality. The religious symbols that adorn his paintings are part of a surrealist universe stemming from the subconscious. His erotic references are a revenge on a puritan adolescence, between Christian taboo and sublimated impulses.

According to him, the artist’s mission is to transcend the material world, like an alchemist who transforms lead into gold. Beerhorst puts on the shaman’s habit of modern times, when he asserts that “painting is the place where the visible and the invisible meet”