Herma de Wit

Herma de Wit works in bronze — sculptures, objects, drawings, etchings, monotypes — each occupied with a single question: what happens to a fragment of nature once it is fixed in a material built to outlast it. She travels compulsively and returns with tokens, a leaf, a seed pod, the memory of a stone, which she then translates, often at scale, into bronze. The fragility of the source and the permanence of the material sit in constant, deliberate tension.

She trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and spent two decades as a fashion designer in Paris, Milan and Antwerp before turning to sculpture full-time in 1999. Her recent work moves further into abstraction, where rhythm rather than resemblance carries the form.

She works from studios in the Betuwe and in Amsterdam.

De Wit's bronze belongs, by instinct, to rooms with history. In Maison d'Artiste her three works are placed not inside the sixth or seventh floor rooms but along the building's staircases, spanning the ground, fourth and fifth floor — thresholds rather than rooms, classical in their own material logic.

The choice follows the work rather than the floor plan: bronze that carries the fossil of a leaf or a stem finds its counterpart in stone that has carried a century of footsteps.

Ascending past Euphorbia #02, Abstract #04 and Object #04 as they appear along the way, a visitor moves through the same tension the work is built on — the durable, holding the ephemeral in place.