Burkhard Driest

Burkhard Driest was born in 1939 in Stettin, then Germany and today Szczecin, Poland, into a Europe being transformed by war, violence and shifting borders. His early life was marked by the consequences of the Second World War and displacement – an experience in which home, geography and national belonging could no longer be understood as stable or permanent conditions.

This rupture between origin and belonging remained present throughout his life and found expression in his painting. Driest repeatedly turned towards the human figure and the self, confronting vulnerability, aggression and the psychological traces left by lived experience. In Selbstbildnis, the seated figure offers no stable or reassuring likeness. Worked in acrylic and charcoal, the body appears exposed to the pressures of its own pictorial space, as though external histories have become internal conditions.

Within Negotiating Belonging, the work speaks to what happens when history forces a person to renegotiate their relationship to place, origin and ultimately themselves. Here, belonging is not simply where one comes from, but something carried through memory, rupture and reinvention. The self becomes an accumulation of what has been inherited, endured and transformed – revealing how profoundly the forces that displace us can become part of who we are.