Jaap Mooy

Jaap Mooy (1915–1987) was an “outsider artist” who lived in Bergen throughout his life. While still working as a blacksmith and metalworker, he became fascinated by making art and by the artistic lifestyle of the Bergen artists he regularly encountered in local cafés. This marked the beginning of an idiosyncratic artistic career. Although Mooy considered enrolling at an academy, he followed the advice of Charlie Toorop and her circle to remain self-taught.

His early work from the 1930s consists of photo collages and small assemblages, which he himself referred to as viewing boxes. Later, Mooy worked in the style of Cobra. He was close friends with Lucebert and, in the 1960s, exhibited alongside Karel Appel and Lucebert in the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He had already declined an invitation to join the Cobra group earlier on, as Mooy did not want to belong to any movement and wished to maintain his own visual language.

From the late 1950s onward, he became better known for his scrap sculptures and drawings, created using a completely original technique—masterfully executed and rich in expressive power. Marked by the war, and fascinated by both beauty and refuse, Mooy chose to work with discarded materials. These sculptures brought him recognition in Germany and the United States during the 1960s.

Mooy never sought to firmly establish his name. Once a style became fixed, he felt it could no longer be free. With this conviction, he undermined his own signature style and made it difficult for himself to find a place within the established art world. Instead, he preferred to resist authority. For Mooy, making art was not an end in itself; he wanted to raise awareness about human rights, dictatorships, and oppression. He wished to continue responding to the outside world.

The artist from Bergen also went through an abstract period. His later sculptures show affinities with absurdism, in which the madness of everyday life is a recurring motif.