Auke De Vries: Living in Trees

Internationally praised Dutch artist Auke de Vries is known for his small, linear sculptures and drawings. Influenced by the horizontality of The Netherlands, he tends to work with inexpensive materials like wire, string and paper.

In 2000-2001, Yorkshire Sculpture Park played host to de Vries' exhibition Living in Trees, and proved an invigorating platform for his work. After carefully absorbing the Bretton landscape he produced The Watchtower, a piece that captured its atmosphere almost definitively, evoking a sense of a nearby presence observing events. Boasting a plethora of colour and black and white photographs of de Vries' work and an essay by Franz W. Kaiser, this volume was originally published for sale at the exhibition. The essay explores the primitivism of de Vries' work and its link to its surroundings. The use of pedestals in de Vries' work is representative of his approach to art in natural surroundings; acting as the sculpture's traditional link with its context, the pedestal isolates the sculpture from its surroundings. A truly unique artist with a lot to say, this book showcases de Vries' work in a series of stunning sketches, sculptures and photographs.