Henk Peeters Dutch, 1925-2013

During his studies at the Koninklijke Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague, Henk Peeters (b. 1925 The Hague - d. 2013 Gelderland), The Netherlands worked with the painting of the CoBrA group. In the end however he turned against this style of subjective, figurative painting and in 1958 created his first monochrome structures. In the same year Peeters became a member of the Dutch Informel Group, together with Armando, Bram Bogart, Kees van Bohemen, Jan Henderikse and Jan Schoonhoven. Through contact with Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein he got to know in turn the German ZERO artists, Mack, Piene and Uecker.

In 1959 Peeters worked on his first fire pictures, two years later his cotton wool pieces followed, taking on the themes of light and shadow. In 1961, along with Armando, Henderikse and Schoonhoven, he founded the NUL group and edited the magazine NUL=0. After helping organize a survey of ZERO work at the Stedelijk in 1965, Peeters retreated from the art world, devoting much of his time over the next three decades to working as a psychologist but remained an active spokesman for the group.