Winner Sacha Tanja Penning 2010

Every year the Sacha Tanja medal is handed over to an artist, person or an organisation that has made a difference in the area of figurative art in the Netherlands.

This year the medal has been handed out to Philip Akkerman during the Realisme fair of 2010. Ever since he started his studies, this artist has been solidly making portraits. In the past thirty years, he has made more than 6000 self-portraits in a variation of different styles. His oeuvre contains realistic, impressionistic, cubistic and expressionistic portraits. The subject is the same every time, but the appearance constantly differs. This makes the work of Akkerman unique. By choosing for the ‘limitations’ of the self-portrait, the artist shows that the number of possibilities are endless, his work does not ever become dull. In his paintings and woodcuts you can see a lot of different facial expressions and different moods. His face is also constantly changing, he becomes older as time goes by and the series of the portraits grow. Akkerman’s work is in line with the tradition of the work of artists like Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Max Beckmann (1884-1950) and Francis Picabia (1879-1953), who also made series of self-portraits. Akkerman’s oeuvre is one of the most recognizable oeuvres in the contemporary Dutch art world.

The paintings of this artist are to be found in many public and private collections, abroad and in the Netherlands; including in the collection of the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, the Gemeentemuseum in Den Haag, the Museum voor Moderne Kunst in Arnhem and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He has won several prices like the Ouborg Prijs (1999) and the Sandberg Prijs (1993). In 2006 the book 2314 Selfportraits was published, in which his entire oeuvre is documented.