The Pumping and Penetrating Needle. Berend Strik's Embroidery Techniques and his Art

In the late 1980s and the 1990s, Berend Strik's work touched upon the growing accessibility and mass consumption of images that might induce a state of rapture. Particularly in his embroidered work, he alluded to the ever-increasing need for instant gratification and fleeting pleasure and to the way the expanding image industry exploits this need. In this age of the advance of the media and its never-ending exploitation of human intimacy, his work played an investigative, contemplative role. Strik also referred to the cyclical and mechanical processes within the human condition that are needed to keep it going. In recent years, however, his work appears to have become a more uncritical element within the huge expansion of the visual culture and its exploitation of intimate images.