Biography

Born in the Netherlands, October 1937, Herman Makkink became interested in art in 1961, when he was living in Japan. Later, in southern California, having seen the art boxes of Joseph Cornell, he began to assemble pieces of scrap iron that had fallen off the freight cars he was shunting for Pacific Electric Railway. That was in 1965. He gives an account of these early years of travel and his evolution as an artist, in his graphic memoir The Shortest Way Home. He settled in London in 1966, where he first met up with the writer Julia Blackburn. He learned basic sculpture technique while working as a ​technical assistant in the 3D Department of the London College of Printing. Together with his brother, the painter Cornelis Makkink, he acquired a studio at St Catherine’s Docks, from S.P.A.C.E., an organization headed by the artists Bridget Riley and Peter Sedgeley. There, in 1969 he was discovered by Stanley Kubrick who used two of his works in his 1971 film A Clockwork Orange: Rocking Machine and Christ Unlimited. Through SPACE, Herman took part in several group shows and from 1971 he had a one-man exhibition at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Returning to Amsterdam in 1972, he began constructing boxes in which dramatic human events had just happened or were about to happen. He died in Suffolk UK, October 2013.