Deciphering the artist's mind: All things are devoid of intrinsic existences

About this work

Deciphering the artist's mind: All things are devoid of intrinsic existences (2018) belongs to Berend Strik's long-running Deciphering the Artist's Mind series, in which he photographs artists' studios and transforms those images through stitching, layered textiles, and selective emphasis. Rather than treating the studio as a neutral documentary space, Strik turns it into a site of interpretation, where memory, process, and atmosphere become visible through intervention.

The title points to one of the central tensions in the series. Strik approaches the studio as a place charged with traces of thought, while also acknowledging that an artist's inner world can never be fully accessed or fixed in a single image. On the Galerie Fons Welters listing, this work is identified as (studio RJ), linking it to Ray Johnson and giving the image the character of both portrait and translation.

The stitched additions are essential to that transformation. They interrupt the photograph, slow down the act of looking, and redirect attention toward selected zones within the composition. The result sits between documentation and reinvention: a work that uses textile intervention to question authorship, presence, and the limits of representation.

References: Galerie Fons Welters artwork page; Yale University Press: Berend Strik: Deciphering the Artist's Mind.