Puck Verkade
Puck Verkade (1987) is a Dutch artist and arts educator based in Berlin. She creates installations, sculptures, and videos that draw viewers into surreal, cartoon-like worlds where comedy and critique intertwine.
Playful, subversive and toying with the absurd, Puck Verkade’s films awaken a magical world that lures the viewer in and then confuses them, making the undertone of the work haunting and uncomfortable. Through a surrealist gaze she revises archetypal narratives that shape the social systems we have created for ourselves. The wider themes Verkade engages with in her work conjure up the complex relations between the inner and outer worlds, ranging from the questions of accountability and complicity, to reproductive rights, bodily agency and consent. All rather layered subjects that she approaches with sincere curiosity and humorist sensibility.
Verkade’s hybrid characters exist somewhere in-between animal and human, camouflage and drag, fact and fiction. A confused pigeon, an inner demon, a frustrated housefly, a curious ancestor; these protagonists reflect the various personas we carry inside us and how they always find a way to the surface despite our best attempts to suppress them. They have uneasy or unwanted questions to ask out loud, and Verkade’s topsy-turvy and cartoon-like worlds leave space to consider less binary answers.
In earlier video works Verkade sourced the visual elements and avatars from popular culture, internet and mainstream mythologies. Moving image remains central to her practice, however in recent years she’s expanded beyond the screen into sculpture and setdesign, paper-based works, and site specific installations that allow her absurdist worlds to unfold outside the audiovisual realm. The ongoing project Uprooted (2023–ongoing) grew out of her interest in the ethics of care across species and proposes an ecological worldview beyond human dominance, centred on shared intelligence and undeniable interdependency across life forms.
Verkade received her BFA from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and completed an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London. Her work has been shown at various international venues, including the 16e Biennale de Lyon; the Yokohama Triennale, Japan; Multi Media Art Triennial Beijing, China; C5CNM, Beijing, China; Artissima Art Fair in Turin; Wroclaw Contemporary Museum in Poland; IKOB Museum, Eupen, Belgium; De Nederlandsche Bank, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; LISTE Art Fair and Kunstmuseum Gegenwart Basel. She was selected as a 2017-2018 resident artist at Sarabande The Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation in London. In 2021 she received the prestigious Charlotte Koehler Prize from the Prins Bernhard Culture Fund in The Netherlands.
Verkade’s work is held in private and public collections internationally such as Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Servais Family Collection in Brussels, EKARD Collection in Wassenaar, amongst others. Since 2018 Verkade has been invited to teach, lecture and host workshops at various BA and MA degrees across Europe and the UK.
