Marcha van den Hurk

Marcha van den Hurk (Winterswijk, 1975) studied sculpture and mixed media at the AKI academy for visual arts in Enschede and autonomous art at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI). Van den Hurk works in a variety of media: she creates large spatial installations, makes photographes, drawings, and sculptures, or combines various different media. Central theme in her work is the relation between human beings and their social environment and physical surroundings. She explores how the environment determines a person's identity but also how people express their identity by shaping their environment, examining for example the lifestyle of certain subcultures or the individualistic existence of homeless people. She reveals the connection between identity and environment by emphasizing or distorting this relation. Sometimes the connection even seems to disappear completely. Van den Hurk lives and works in Rotterdam.