Ad Dekkers (1938-1974)

‘Wood-engravings: I tried to give the line as much meaning as possible,
and I adapted the function of the board to this purpose. It is no longer a
pronouncedly flat form that is subdivided, nor is it a three-dimensional
form whose mass is cut through: the base of a wood-engraving is a
neutral field on which the line can come fully into its own’
(A. Dekkers, 1973, quoted in Basically White, exh. cat., London, 1974, p. 24).


‘One of the most valuable services a commercial dealer can provide in London is to introduce us to an established foreign artist whose work, for reasons no one should be complacent about, has never been seen here at all. The gallery performs, if you like, the role of a conscience-pricker; and when it is as small as Lucy Milton’s at 125 Notting Hill Gate, it offers still more damning proof that worthwhile shows do not necessarily need formidable financial backing. This time she has imported Ad Dekkers, a Dutch sculptor in his early thirties whom Holland regards as one of her best younger artists. I say ‘sculptor’ because Dekkers has never strayed beyond the procedures and materials which can be said to belong to sculpture. (…) Modest in size, painted and polished to a uniform smoothness which makes them act as neutral backgrounds, these slightly projecting blocks are meant as little more than carriers for Dekkers’ linear structures.’
(R. Cork, Everything seemed possible: Art in the 1970s, London 2003, p. 89.)