Introduction to the work of Paul Dikker

Paul Dikker is an independent, internationally oriented visual artist. He finished his art studies at the Dutch National Academy of Fine Art (in Dutch, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten) and he graduated with distinction from his studies in Political Science at the University of Amsterdam.
Very few artists in the Netherlands are able to make a living from their art. Paul Dikker is one of them. He has been supporting himself as an artist without any other job or state subsidy. The Finnish cultural anthropologist Paavali Virtanen described his work in 2018 as 'Peripheral Sentensialism'.
In 2023, Dikker actually left for the periphery. For a year now, he has been creating his art in the peace and quiet of his new studio in the French countryside.

Since 1997 Paul Dikker has been travelling frequently through Spain and Portugal, where he also worked and lived for a while. From 2006 to 2013 he painted in Norway for at least three months a year. He has exhibited his work in The Netherlands, Norway, Belgium and Germany. In Norway he exhibited his work in Oslo, Bergen, Voss, Arendal, Norheimsund, Ålvik and Utne. In 2007 the Oslo Museum organized a solo exhibition with his paintings. In 2010 the publishing house Aschehoug Forlag (Oslo) released the book 'Alt det som er' (Everything there is), for which Paul Dikker collaborated with the Norwegian writer Bjørn Sortland. The book was spread across all the libraries in Norway. It got great reviews and even had a second edition.

In Norway, landscape increasingly became the central theme of his paintings. After a period in which he concentrated on the silence and grandiosity of nature he is recently zooming into details as branches, leaves or parts of them. Recognizable nature is disappearing and his paintings become more and more non-figurative. More than ever, he is painting nature as an encompassing and overwhelming presence that is beyond our human understanding. It is exactly the absence of fixed meaning that defines our human condition: the ability as individuals with a free will to determine our own world and give it our own authentic purpose and meaning. With his adventurous, formally non-figurative paintings Dikker creates a diverse, surprising and open universe that can not be captured in obvious, trivial and one-dimensional interpretations. His work is a loving ode to beauty and the mystery of life in all its silent incomprehensibility, and thus a “self-evident expression of a peripheral state of mind,” says Virtanen.

Dikker is active in various boards (including Pictoricht), acts as technical chairman and moderates meetings. He previously published articles on art, art policy and entrepreneurship. He is also the publisher of the magazine WAW. Dikker is a member of the Professional Association of Visual Artists (BBK), Platform BK and Maatschappij Arti et Amicitiae.

His paintings can be found in the collections of Teylers Museum, the provinces of Flevoland and North-Holland, the University of Amsterdam, the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Social and Economic Council of the Netherlands, City of Diemen, ING-bank, Shell, Oslo Museum (Norway) and many other companies and private persons in Belgium, Curacao, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, United Kingdom and the United States.

In May 2006 his painting 'Somewhere else' has been chosen as the third best Dutch work of art of the past 50 years.