Puck Verkade

Delivered with humour and a distinct taste for the absurd, Puck Verkade’s video installations and drawings tell stories from uncanny perspectives, in which archetypal personas are reimagined to candidly expose the contradictions of human behaviour. Shifting between handcrafted stopmotion, digital animation and performance, her fast paced montages have the sensation of a moving collage; a dense juxtaposition of layered images and sounds composed into a cartoon reality in which anything is possible. 

Verkade’s hybrid characters exist somewhere in-between animal and human, camouflage and drag, fact and fiction. 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. The wider themes she engages with in her work conjure up the complex relations between the inner and outer worlds. The main threads weaving through her entire practice range from the questions of accountability and complicity, the ecological crisis to reproductive rights, bodily agency and consent - all rather layered subjects that she approaches with sincere curiosity and humorist sensibility.

Puck Verkade is a visual artist, arts educator and mother. Her work has recently been shown at various international platforms like the 8th Yokohama Triennial in Japan, Kunstmuseum Gegenwart in Basel, the 16th Biennale de Lyon, Wroclaw Museum of Contemporary Art. Forthcoming exhibitions include solo shows during Gallery Weekend Bejing and at De Nederlandsche Bank, Amsterdam. Verkade lives and works in Berlin.

Puck Verkade (1987) received her BA Fine Arts degree from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and completed an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University, London. She was a 2017-2018 resident artist at Sarabande: The Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation in London. In 2021 Verkade was awarded the Charlotte Koehler Prize by the Prins Bernhard Culture Fund in The Netherlands. Her video installations are held in private and public collections internationally such as Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Servais Family Collection in Brussels, the Zabludowicz collection in London, the EKARD Collection in Wassenaar, and the Blue Knowledge Art Collection in Amsterdam.