A pizza maker from Brooklyn, a factory worker from Ukraine: on his travels, Hendrik Beikirch meets people whose faces tell stories, stories of hard work and of hope for a better life.
Between Struggle and Hope
At the heart of Faces of Hope and Struggle are large-format portraits. On his travels, Hendrik Beikirch sketched people who caught his eye through their special presence and their very personal expression somewhere between struggle and hope. The portraits are striking in their reduction to the person and deliberately show their subjects face-on. Formally, they recall the biometrically optimised format of modern passport photos. But where a passport photo merely identifies, Beikirch’s faces tell of a life.
Spray Paint, Acrylic and Water
In recent years, Hendrik Beikirch has developed his own technique combining spray paint, acrylic and water, creating a sketch-like aesthetic on canvas reminiscent of watercolour. Layers of text are worked into the varnish, revealing themselves only when viewers change their position in front of the painting and the light reflects differently. Alongside the canvases, the original sketches are also on show.
From Place to Face
Faces of Hope and Struggle is Hendrik Beikirch’s second exhibition at Pretty Portal. In Einen Sommer, he showed places and night scenes he had discovered on his way to his nocturnal interventions in public space. Now, for the first time, he puts people themselves at the centre.
About the Artist
Hendrik Beikirch was born in Kassel in 1974. In the late 1980s, he picked up a spray can for the first time and left his mark on trains. He later studied art education in Koblenz, where he now lives and works. Since the 1990s, he has been a fixture of the graffiti and street art scene under his tag ecb.
“Faces of Hope and Struggle”
ecb · Hendrik Beikirch
Opening
Friday, 18 June 2010, 7 pm
Exhibition
18 June – 16 July 2010
Pretty Portal
Brunnenstraße 12
40223 Düsseldorf
Note (2026): Since then, Hendrik Beikirch has become internationally renowned for his portraits. In 2012, he painted a mural around 70 metres high in Busan, South Korea, at the time the tallest in Asia. Today, his monumental black-and-white portraits of workers, fishermen and elderly people can be seen on facades around the world.
