Gerard Caris

Gerard Caris (b. 1925)

After his education in Technical School Maastricht Caris' life until 1970's was divided into working as petrol engineer in Far and Middle East, Africa and the United States, and as a student of art and philosophy in USA (1957-1967).

He graduated from the Monterey Peninsula College, California, the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies and San José College(arts and humanities) and later from the University of California, Berkeley a. o. with David Hockney, Ronald Kitaj, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn. He has B. A. in Philosophy and “Masters degree in art" from the University of California, Berkeley.

Since 1970 he lives and works as full time artist in Maastricht, creating a remarkable corpus of work from a single form, Pentagon. He is producing sculptures, reliefs, paintings, drawings, graphic editions using the limitles possibilities of pentagon geometry and its spatial form of dodechachedron.

He describes his work as: Proposing as its central motive the pentagon and its related geometry – which in all its branchings have been pursued in a high variety of ways and paraphrased in a new visual language coined Pentagonism. Be known to us since antiquity, but for a number of understandable, and a greater amount of unclear reasons almost totally neglected, the pentagon revealed itself in my investigations and art practice as a form possessing not only an unbelievable degree of versatility, but also a key to a new form of structural compositioning which in formal scientific theory was not only declared impossible but forbidden. The impossibility of translational symmetry with regular pentagon symmetries which was the reason given by science for the impossibility to continuous regular tessellations and spacial structuring, must have been taken over blindly by the art and design world, for when I started my research in 1968, no continuous structures with pentagons – or its spacial component the dodecahedron- could be found to exist. Intuitively conceived in a spontaneous composition titled Creation of the Pentagon and unhindered by scientific prejudice I started to conceive, – unlike Kandinsky's point, to line, to form – direct polyhedrally, with this one single form and its spacial component the dodecahedron.

Since 1968 his work has been presented in prestigious museums and institutions such as ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven; Bonnefanten museum, Maastricht; Parsons School of Design, New York NY; Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Utrecht; Stadtmuseum Ratingen; Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen; Kunsthalle, Bremen; Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt; and in numerous European art galleries in solo and group shows.

While Caris' work concept and aesthetics is mainly based on Modernist Constructivism and Op Art and evidently on the crossline of science, technology and art, the rich variety of forms, techniques and materials and his post-structural approach of creating a simulative form language indicate his Post-modern way of production.