About the Artist
Jaap Bos (Rotterdam, 1961) is a self-taught artist, living and working in Utrecht, the Netherlands, specialized in graphic work. His art work has distinct figurative elements, is expressionist to a degree (Bos loves Beckmann), definitely not symbolic. You can read his work easily, it needs no interpretation. The images are like stories. A skinny figure in the middle of an earie landscape, a desert or the moon. You want to ask the man: “Why don’t you get up?” With one tired eye he gazes at you. “I am resting” Of what? you’d want to know. To Jaap Bos, who teaches social sciences at Utrecht University, art is not so much about finding expression for an inner world, it is much akin to research. Art too questions reality, but unlike science, it doesn’t provide answers. It engages the spectator, it triggers one’s imagination, becomes a friend. Yes, one is reminded of what Kandinsky once said, of how a work of art emerges out of the artist in a strange and mysterious way, and how once separated from him, it acquires a life of its own.
