Biography

Frans Lampe was born in Tilburg in 1951. In the early fifties his family came to live next-door to the painter Jos Zeegers who quickly became his childhood role model. After a checkered school career including a three year spell at a boarding school he enrolled in the Academy of Visual Arts in his home town. He graduated in 1976 and took up painting as his career.

In 1979 he was admitted to the prestigious Jan van Eijck Academie, a postgraduate institute in Maastricht. A year or so later Lampe won a Government of Canada Award that enabled him to study abroad. This proved to be a very important and rewarding experience. He was in the postgraduate section of the department of Visual Arts of the University of Victoria. It was here that he made his first shaped canvasses. This approach offered intriguing new possibilities and soon became one of the distinguishing qualities of his art. In 1983 he obtained his MFA at Uvic. Back in the Netherlands he started teaching at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague, he taught there till 2017.

In the mid-1990’s Lampe more and more began using the computer in order to create his work. Here he discovered a way of working that, to him, felt unexpectedly similar to the painting process. Currently he uses just the computer/printer as his medium.

After 2000 his work became more and more focused on the making of ‘reconstructions’. Therefor he photographs a landscape or interior very extensively in thousands of photographs. These photographs are then rearranged on the computer to create unexpected panorama’s made remarkable by Lampe’s choices in the process of reconstructing.