Gerrit Benner (Leeuwarden 1897-Nijemirdum) was a self-taught artist. In addition to being a shopkeeper, with his wife Geesje, he was a house painter. In 1937 he went bankrupt and destroyed all his art from before that period. After WWII, Benner finally chose to become an artist and found inspiration from Hendrik Werkman, Siep van den Berg and the Ecole de Paris. His work has similarities with De Ploeg and also Cobra with its styling and use of color. His work became increasingly expressive in the late 1940s and the paint was applied thicker than before. He develops a lyrical expressionist painting style. He worked in culturally rather isolated Friesland until 1953. In 1954, his son took over Karel Appel's studio in Amsterdam for Gerrit and he had his first exhibition at the Stedelijk. Benner, from that moment on he was also part of a renewal movement within art. Appel, who had already visited him in Leeuwarden with Corneille in 1945, called him 'a born painter with a Nordic fabulous side to his work'.
He was best known for his abstract, multi-colored landscape paintings without becoming completely abstract; he painted a dreamy fairytale world. Almost all paintings by soloist Gerrit Benner have Friesland as their subject with a broad horizon, the farms, the water, the dunes, horses and cattle on the land. You feel his deep admiration for that nature, in simple forms. His gouaches and oil paintings are made with four or five colors in which recognizable shapes are almost always visible. The painting style was fully embedded in the modern art of his time, but emphatically has an authentic, personal character with always an eye for the human dimension.
The cloths are usually green, blue and gray in color, sometimes with a red or yellow accent. In later periods, works became more sober, as in his early work. For many, Benner's internalized work expresses the same comfort that also characterized the landscape art of his Frisian predecessor Jan Mankes. He tried to create as much expression as possible with even less material (paint and elements). Benner himself once stated: 'Sometimes the world constricts me and then I always return to nature, the source of all things'.
The cloths are usually green, blue and gray in color, sometimes with a red or yellow accent. In later periods, works became more sober, as in his early work. For many, Benner's internalized work expresses the same comfort that also characterized the landscape art of his Frisian predecessor Jan Mankes. He tried to create as much expression as possible with even less material (paint and elements). Benner himself once stated: 'Sometimes the world constricts me and then I always return to nature, the source of all things'.