Earth samples from the artist's home area, near Eschenau DE. Herman de Vries (Alkmaar, 11 July 1931) spelled his name without capital letters to "avoid hierarchies", so as herman de vries. The artist makes extensive use of natural and found materials. In his oeuvre concepts such as ‘being’ and ‘reality’ play an important role; not the thinking about these concepts but the sensory experience of them is significant. Because ‘herman de vries’ considers nature as our primary reality, he often shows it as a document - stripped of other meanings - offering the experiences that make it possible to discover the poetry of reality. At the Venice Biennale herman de vries represented the Netherlands with the exhibition to be all ways to be in 2015 in the Rietveld Pavilion.