Ger Gerrits artwork • painting • for sale Still life with a fruit basket and cake

Ger Gerrits was a painter and graphic artist who was a key driving force behind the Vrij Beelden, Creatie and Liga Nieuw Beelden artists’ associations in the period after 1945. Having started out as a lithographer, in 1928 he decided to establish himself as an independent artist. In the 1940s he exchanged his figurative, realistic pictorial style for complete abstraction, led by the desire to free art from its pre-war constraints. Colour and form came into their own in his work as fully autonomous elements. In the first years, the artist used the pseudonym Portheine, under which name he took part in the controversial exhibition '12 painters' in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1946.