Stencil Print Eddy Varekamp Two Men with Animal Ochre and Red

Three-colour stencil print on heavy watercolour paper by the Amsterdam artist Eddy Varekamp (born 1949), signed in pencil lower left. The sheet shows two male nudes in an arcadian landscape with an animal in the foreground and a radiant sun, executed in ochre yellow, deep red and black on cream paper with a natural deckle edge. The work is in good condition.

Varekamp works from his studio and gallery on Hartenstraat in the Negen Straatjes district of Amsterdam, where since the nineteen-eighties he has produced prints, watercolours and ceramics. Stencil printing is a technique in which each colour is applied through its own cut template: on this sheet in three successive passes for the ochre ground, the deep red silhouettes and the black plants and facial accents. The composition belongs to a recurring theme in his oeuvre, that of the male couple in a Mediterranean or mythic arcadia: two male nudes side by side, an animal that reads at once as cow and pastoral attribute, and the sun as an almost heraldic motif above the scene. The debt to the late paper collages of Matisse and to the Mediterranean figuration of Picasso is unmistakable.