Co Westerik

Jacobus "Co" Westerik was born on 2 March 1924 in The Hague, Netherlands. He studied at the Royal Academy of Art (Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten) in The Hague from 1942 to 1947, graduating that year, and made a study trip to the United States in 1948. He went on to teach life drawing at the same academy from 1958 to 1971.

Westerik's early recognition came through De visvrouw (The Fishmonger), which won the Jacob Maris Prize for painting in 1951; he won the same prize again in 1953 for drawing and in 1955 for painting. In 1964, curator Wim Beeren included him in Nieuwe Realisten (New Realists) at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag alongside Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, a placement that put him briefly in dialogue with international pop and realist currents even as critics later described him as standing apart from that movement. He represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 1962 and 1982 and took part in the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1965, where he received a silver medal.

From 1971 he divided his working life between Rotterdam and the south of France. He was named a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion in 1999 and made an honorary member of the Hague artists' society Pulchri Studio in 2005. Snijden aan gras (1966) is often cited by Dutch obituary writers as his best known single painting. Westerik died on 10 September 2018 in Rotterdam, at the age of 94.

Westerik's reputation rests on the unsettling physicality of his painting: skin, flesh, small wounds, and ordinary bodily acts rendered with a slow, tempera-like precision. A Christie's catalogue essay described his pictorial world in exactly these terms, as "a physical world made of tangible substance, a world of skin, flesh and bones... in which such beings are born, grow, hurt and destroy, each other, suffer from disease, decay and die." Writing for the 2019 Fergus McCaffrey exhibition, the art historian Hans Locher placed Westerik outside the era's dominant movements, noting that "there was a lot happening, but Co was not part of it, he was something special." That combination, extreme technical control applied to uncomfortable, intimate subject matter, is the recurring thread across the critical record, from his inclusion in Wim Beeren's 1964 Nieuwe Realisten survey to his late paintings of the 2000s and 2010s.

Westerik's secondary market has historically been small and concentrated in the Netherlands. The highest price recorded for his work is USD 144,000 for the painting Zonnebader, sold at Christie's New York in 2007; the exact calendar date of that sale is not confirmed in available auction sources. Most of his results since have come through Dutch regional auction houses; the Venduehuis in The Hague, for example, sold a significant painting with a hammer price of 52,000 euros, well below the Christie's high and not described by the house as a record. Since his death, two international commercial exhibitions, a 2019 show at Fergus McCaffrey in New York and a 2024 centenary exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ in London, have introduced his work to audiences beyond the Netherlands, which may broaden demand over time even though public auction supply remains thin.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Westerik; the Westerik Foundation's own website and archive is the closest thing to an authoritative record of his output, and that should be a starting point for any provenance question. His market has been small, domestically concentrated, and infrequently tested at the highest levels, so the 2007 Christie's result for Zonnebader should be treated as a single strong data point rather than a stable price ceiling. The recent run of international gallery exhibitions in London and New York is the clearest sign of change in how his work is being positioned outside the Netherlands, and collectors should watch whether that translates into a deeper or more international pool of auction consignments.