Wessel Couzijn

'Flying' ('Rising Africa') 1961
Purchased from the artist in 1967.

Location: In front of the Department of Technology Management

In the 1960s Couzijn made a series of highly expressive bronzes. 'Flying' from 1961 (also called 'Africa awakening'), is one of them. Many of his sculptures from that period had some sort of wings, a high rising posture and sharp protuberances. They could be seen first in the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1960), almost all of which was dedicated to Couzijn. This gained him (inter)national recognition at last, after many rejections and disappointments.

Couzijn (Amsterdam, 1912) grew up in New York. When he neglected his school, his mother sent him to relatives in Amsterdam. In 1930 he could go to the National Academy and when he won the Prix de Rome around 1935, he was working in the city of that name. In the war Couzijn, who was Jewish, fled to the United States, where he met famous artists like Zadkine and Jackson Pollock. Back in Amsterdam he started teaching and worked on his sculptures. Around 1950 he formed the Group Amsterdam with Tajiri, Kneulman and Guntenaar among others. Only then did his work acquire its modern traits, with ever greater freedom of form and expression.

Central was the longing for freedom, with aggression as a posture of defense. Abstraction and plasticity supported this concept. Couzijn used wild shapes and protuberances for this and incorporated all sorts of found objects into this, such as bottle caps, bits of pipe and rattan sticks. In 1958 at last he finds a good foundry that is able to cast his intricate and complicated moulds by means of the lost-wax process.

Couzijn was also co-founder of the Ateliers '63 in Haarlem and until his death in 1984 he used to teach there. The ultimate goal of the Ateliers was expressive freedom. Under the guidance of experienced artists the students learned "To express themselves in their work, in order to arrive at a personal signature", as Couzijn explained it.

Sculptures

Wessel Couzijn