Gerard Caris

Gerard Caris (20 March 1925 – 2 January 2025) was a Dutch sculptor and artist who pursued a single motif throughout the course of his artistic career, the pentagon.

Early life and education

1977 Caris was born in Maastricht, Netherlands on 20 March 1925. After attending the technical school in Maastricht he joined the marines as war volunteer trained in Camp Lejeune, N.C., United States, to end the occupation by Japan in World War II. During his training the war was ended by the atom bomb and he was sent to the late colony of the Netherlands Indonesia. In 1947 he came back to the Netherlands, only to leave soon afterwards to the far East in an attempt to escape the poverty of his native surroundings. Ten years later he decided to emigrate to the U.S. Here he studied art and philosophy at the New York University. Combining his art classes with earning a living and visiting all art happenings, museums and galleries, for example the Tinguely happening at the MOMA in NY in 1960 he was overwhelmed by Abstract expressionism and left for the Arabian desert in Dhofar, a sultanate of Muscat and Oman where he worked in his former trade as a petroleum engineer. He did one more important job project, the erection of the Telstar Horn Antenna at the Andover earth station in Maine, then he traveled to California, inspired by the movie he watched while working in the Arabian desert Strangers When We Meet. He studied at the Monterey Peninsula College, California, the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies and San José College (arts and humanities) subsequently at the University of California, Berkeley, a.o. with David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn (In 1967 B. A. in Philosophy, in 1969 M.A. in arts). He returned for a “short visit” to the Netherlands where he continued his art practice without realizing there was no intellectual resonance where he worked but he was so possessed with his newly discovered Pentagonism that he did not realize he has landed on the moon. He kept working continually, evolving new ideas, executing them, and making them public through exhibitions and publications, remaining optimistic, believing that he had added a new chapter to the history of art self coined as Pentagonism.

Caris died on 2 January 2025, at the age of 99.

Gallery Studio of Gerard Caris (1983) From the collection of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

From the collection of Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven From the collection of Bonnefantenmuseum, Maatricht

From the collection of Centraal Museum, Utrecht

From the collection of Peter c Ruppert

From the collection of Wilhelm-Hack Museum

From the collection of ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe