Biography
Having descended from the Hill Country into South Texas, Dick Van der Wurst never claimed to be Texan, but his German heritage and love for tacos is something he shares with many inhabitants of the region. After earning an MFA from Miami University in 1998, he spent the worst years of his life up north, maturing artistically while shaping what would become his Iconoclasmatic Pop Art™ practice.
As a recovering Catholic, cancer survivor, and intuitive empath, Dick slowly morphed into the optimistic existentialist he is today. He has spent the past decade and a half in San Antonio cultivating a practice that balances formal discipline with a healthy skepticism toward artistic orthodoxy. He absorbs the sights, smells, sounds, and emotional residue of his surroundings, reflecting them back to the viewer as oblique meditations on belief systems, and cultural inheritance with a degree of humor embedded in survival.
Dick’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions across Texas and Kentucky and has been recognized with the 2012 San Antonio RAW Artist of the Year award and the San Antonio Art League Annual Artist Exhibition Award in 2013. He lives and works in his turquoise studio-home, known as Dick’s WurstHaus Art Shanty, near downtown San Antonio. His work is currently on view at Period Modern.
Statement
My work dismantles the psychological authority we assign to the sacred, the taboo, and the precious, exposing the quiet banality that often lives behind them. Being both painfully self-aware and conscious of the motives embedded in indoctrination has revealed to me how deeply I was shaped by inherited belief systems—religious, cultural, and personal. Because of this, I explore how meaning is projected, maintained, and rarely questioned. By stripping these structures of their assumed power, I aim to create space for a more empathetic and relativistic view of the world, one less bound by ritual, tradition, or unexamined narrative.
This inquiry is inseparable from lived experience. As a recovering Catholic, cancer survivor, and optimistic existentialist, I approach belief with both intimacy and skepticism. My imagery reflects that tension, using familiar, monumentally mundane symbols that feel approachable before quietly undermining their assumed significance. Humor often enters through the side door—not to soften the work, but to make the act of reexamination more accessible.
Material plays a critical role in this process. I work primarily with layered acrylic on salvaged fence pickets, surfaces already marked by time, labor, and exposure. These materials carry their own histories, mirroring the cultural and psychological layers embedded in the imagery itself. The resulting works blur the line between image and object, stacking physical and conceptual strata that press outward into the viewer’s space.
Through unexpected juxtapositions and accumulated layers, the work invites viewers to reconsider what they have been taught to value, fear, or revere, as well as the overlooked evocative power of common things. By reexamining the familiar, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify conventional beliefs or ignore the potentially toxic narratives they uphold. In that discomfort, I hope a more honest, shared understanding can begin to emerge.