Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2008

Source Publication

Bikkers, Rudolf. Morphogenetic Fields. Toronto: Craig Scott Gallery, 2008.

Abstract

: This essay comments on the work of artist Rudolf Bikkers (1943-2023) exhibited in a show called Morphogenetic Fields at Craig Scott Gallery in 2008. On exhibition were 17 mixed-media works (colour lithographs pulled from limestone followed by acrylic painting, on fine archival paper). The entire exhibition catalogue is reproduced, with the permission of the Bikkers’ estate, as the necessary visual context for the essay. Born in Hilversum, the Netherlands, Bikkers’ arts education involved both the visual arts and music. He received his MFA from the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht; that period of art study (1960-1966) overlapped with ten years (1956-1966) dedicated to studying the cello in both Hilversum and Maastricht. After immigration to Canada, Rudolf Bikkers was a master printmaker, a painter, and a Professor of Printmaking at Toronto’s OCAD University. His work is characterized by supreme technical skill, meticulous execution, and, in many of his works, a unique visual vocabulary. This vocabulary generated prints, paintings and mixed-media works that combine grace, equipoise, and calm, on the one hand, with tension and explosive energy, on the other. Bikkers frequently drew inspiration both from the realm of music and from the discoveries of biology. In 1982, Martin L. Robinson described the forms in Bikkers’ mixed media works (colour lithographs with acrylic painting) as “biomorphic, biocentric, or, perhaps better, biodynamic”, as forms “bursting with energy and anticipation..., [s]ome divid[ing] in a biological or cellular way while others…explode.” Then, as in Morphogenetic Fields a quarter century later, Bikkers’ imagery has a “distinctively sensuous quality,” many of his works bursting with fecund pod-like forms. The specific reference and inspiration for Morphogenetic Fields were the ideas of biologist and philosopher Rupert Sheldrake, inter alia, on morphic resonance in nature. The bioimaginary of Bikkers’ earlier work tended to engage the inner life of the microscopic organism, including morphogenesis (intra-organism biological processes that generate tissue shape and biological form in plant and animal embryos). Bikkers then become fascinated by hypotheses that morphogenesis may either exist as a phenomenon, or at least be extended as a metaphorical idea, beyond the physical to the psychic realm and beyond the single organism to inter-organism connectedness – and some sort of associated collectivity of mind that includes biophysical resonance of the past in the present. Influenced by Sheldrake, Bikkers’ Morphogenetic Fields series engaged the premise that invisible and phenomenologically ambiguous “morphogenetic fields” may explain how certain forms of understanding and knowledge can be transmitted between organisms – over distance and over time. The works narrated by the author of “Foreword: An Art of Mind” fuse a spatialized musicality with floating, fantastical physical forms and a string-like fabric of space. Bikkers’ fecund, even hyperactive, imagination is on full display as a playground of the spirit, an art of mind.

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