In an excerpt from an essay on Philip Akkerman published in Hunch (No. 9 Summer 2005), art and architecture writer Jeffrey Kipnis writes:

Working in The Hague, Philip Akkerman paints nothing but self-portraits, one after another, year after year. He poses in a mirror, works typically, though not exclusively, with a process formalized in the Renaissance, and “when the complete surface is filled up with paint, when there is no white spot visible any more, the painting is finished.” “I don’t care about good and bad,” he says, “because what is good or bad?”

Kipnis concludes his essay:

Along my favorite of those branches, painters like David Reed and Jonathan Lasker revisit the repeating motif as a means to explore the adequacy of painting (and each painting) both in and as an evolving, historical and conceptual world, that is, in and as involvement. If Reed’s color-symphonic settings of gestural arabesques and Lasker’s urbane improvisations on ideographic riffs establish the rigor and range (intellectual and affective) of the motif program, then Fabian Marcaccio, with his 661 “conjectures for new paint management,” explores the extremities, perversions and pathologies of its outer fringe. And it is along this branch, I suggest, that Akkerman’s experiment is well located.

The exhibition will include 43 drawings executed in pencil, watercolor and gouache. The works date from 1985 to 2003.