Pyke Koch artwork • painting • previously for sale Het uur U II

Pyke Koch , along with Carel Willink , belong to the realist painters who became well-known among a wider public. His paintings depict motifs from reality incongruously juxtaposed, thus giving his pictures a sense of alienation. In the first half of the nineteen twenties his brother-in-law August Stärcke introduced him to the theories of psychoanalyses and the world of visual art. Koch’s first Magical Realist works, from 1930-1931, are influenced by Stärcke’s notion of art being ‘aesthetic, erotic, religious magic’. Koch painted landscapes and portraits, but also more controversial subject matter like prostitutes and rundown neighbourhoods. His work, like that by Carel Willink and Dick Ket, for instance, is defined as Magical Realism, a movement akin to German Neue Sachlichkeit and Belgium and French Surrealism. Koch’s artistic legacy is relatively small – it is estimated he only left around one hundred works. The artist painted three versions of Het uur U: I in 1958, II in 1963 and III in 1971.