It is almost impossible to escape the impact of Ronald Westerhuis. Not so much the artist as the work he produces. Westerhuis came to art by a roundabout route and the evidence of his former existence as a welder in the offshore industry is everywhere apparent. Or rather, he has continued to be that very same welder and offshore industry worker and has simply transplanted himself into the art world. He operates with enormous success in Shanghai and must surely often have played with the idea of basing himself there full-time. He continues to maintain his studio in Zwolle, not far from the Museum De Fundatie, and commutes to and fro between China and the Netherlands.
It must be 10 years since I first met Ronald Westerhuis. He showed me his furniture and his vast sculptural works, many of them still at the design stage. He proved to possess
an unstoppable creative urge, a passion to adorn the world with his art and... an attentive ear to the wishes of his clients. The latter quality is particularly interesting and is what brought Eric van Eerdenburgh, director of the Lowlands Festival, and me to talk to Westerhuis in 2011 about the possibility of a sculpture to be exhibited both at the festival and in the sculpture garden at Kasteel het Nijenhuis. A difficult commission because the two places are so very different. The result was RAWSOME!, a stainless steel sphere four metres in diameter with concave mirrored surfaces.
Ronald Westerhuis’s international career began in 2003, when he designed the flame for the 2008 Olympic Games in Peking. He went on to collaborate with Daniel Libeskind on a sculpture of World Expo 2015 and he is representing the Netherlands at World Expo 2020 in Dubai. Ronald A. Westerhuis held his first major museum exhibition of his work to Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle, The Netherlands in 2018 and his first solo exhibition with SmithDavidson Gallery in Amsterdam, SOUL by Ronald A. Westerhuis, in the fall of 2020.