Two Voices, One Room: Berend Strik and Kees de Goede at Stedelijk Museum Schiedam
Two Voices, One Room
From 27 September 2025 to 1 March 2026 Stedelijk Museum Schiedam brought Berend Strik together with painter Kees de Goede. The pairing set Strik's stitched photographs beside De Goede's painting and let the two practices speak across the room.
The conversation is a natural one. Both artists build their images slowly, layer by layer, and both trust the hand to find meaning that a first idea cannot. Strik's contribution, work such as the embroidered photograph Diversion, shows how thread can do what paint does: weight a surface, hold a colour, and turn a recorded moment into something felt.
Seeing the work in a museum setting matters. A stitched photograph rewards close looking, and the gallery wall gives it the distance and the quiet it needs. Visitors moved between the intimacy of the needle and the openness of the painted canvas, and the two registers sharpened each other.
The exhibition confirmed a steady truth about Strik's practice. His work belongs in the company of painting, not as an imitation of it, but as another way of building an image by hand over time.
