I lost my heart in Armenia

Woodcuts and linoleum cuts by Sietse Bakker

Sietse Bakker is a woodcarver, just like M.C. Escher was. Within a print, Bakker often combines the woodcut with the linocut. He makes his own paint and is a craftsman.
Bakker is strongly inspired by the Russian avant-garde, especially by the combination of text and image. For this exhibition he engages in dialogue with texts by the Jewish-Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam about Armenia.

Sietse Bakker’s graphic works are not modernistic, but unique. His urge to literally process themes that are close to his heart in this way leads him to adopt a visual idiom that seems remote. Bakker proves the opposite. He breaks through the unity of time and place, a classic achievement in European visual art. Space and time offer room for everyone’s own experience. A mobile spatial concept where the bottom can be the top and the front is the back.