Vanderheyden was born into a middle-class family in ’s-Hertogenbosch, a provincial town in the south of the Netherlands. His childhood was relatively care-free, but he struggled at school. After unsuccessfully trying several programs, Vanderheyden, driven by his passion for painting, decided to enroll at the provincial art school in Breda. The years at art school left him disillusioned. At the time, students were told to focus on drawing and anatomy. Instead, Vanderheyden wished to paint, and his ideas of art were considered deviant and strange. After three years at the academy, he was the only one of his year to fail the final exams. The following period he spent time at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam, the School for Art Teachers in Tilburg, and the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. However, he soon realized that he did not recognize himself in the ideas about art and artists of these institutions.

In 1956, he settled in his hometown ‘s-Hertogenbosch. Two years later, at the age of thirty, Vanderheyden finally decided to break with the conventional ideas and become an artist in his own way. The subject he chose was not the emotional life of the artist, which played a central role in much of the art around him. Instead, he freed himself from gestural expressiveness to gradually move towards more abstract work. One day he divided a small canvas into two halves, a partition between black and white. From then he took painting and its fundamental principles as his theme. He adopted a style in which no residue of the artist’s subjectivity was visible and focused on a repertoire of a limited number of abstract forms, namely the grid, the frame, the gate, and the partition of top and bottom. He dealt only with the organization of the pictorial space and the investigation of painting itself.

In 1967, after his first substantial solo exhibition, Vanderheyden determined that the path of questioning the essence and limits of painting had led to a dead-end, and he decided to stop painting. During this period Vanderheyden devoted his attention to experimenting with new media techniques, such as Polaroid photography, film, and video. During these experiments, he concentrated on complex metaphysical issues of light, time, and space and on the processes of consciousness. He became fascinated by the reproduction of his own reality, reproduced his own work, but also that of other artists such as Vermeer, Bruegel, and Velazquez. With these works, combined with mirrors and television screens, he constructed installations in his studio, which he then photographed, creating a Russian doll effect. The visual and conceptual theme of the studio regularly resurfaced from then on and became one of the dominant principles in his artistic practice. As put by the director Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam at the time, Rudi Fuchs: “Vanderheyden investigates the painting in its elementary form, as an indefinite, flat piece of canvas stretched on a frame, which can take on any shape or size desired. This basic form is experienced as a purely optical plane. Sometimes he will paint the narrow sides of his paintings so as to be able to experience them as physical objects. For a time he painted the back of the canvas as well."

Vanderheyden started to paint again in 1975, not as his central activity, but rather as one of a number of creative possibilities. He treated painting as an instrumental procedure, often realizing these later works by exploring photography, printing, video, together with surveillance technology like cameras and mirrors. He also abandoned the need for constant innovation, which had been a governing principle of his practice and ideas on art up until then. Instead, he expanded his older works in revised versions, the partitions developed into fresh horizons of various sizes in bright white and a radiant light blue, and the grids became wild checkerboard patterns.

Investigating the visual qualities of spatial perception and the notions of the nearby and intimate versus the distant and wide, he was brought to undertake several trips to the Far East: India, the Himalayas, Nepal, and China. During these travels, he experienced the majestic bent horizons as seen from an airplane window, the cloud covers with a clear sky above, a division into white and blue. It turned out to be a theme in his paintings for the years to come. When he had the opportunity to take the joystick himself in a training airplane, he experienced the full sensation of a tilting horizon.

In the late seventies and eighties, Vanderheyden established his reputation with important retrospective exhibitions and two artist’s books. These exhibitions were not retrospective exhibitions in the traditional sense, but instead, Vanderheyden considered them as a single work of art in itself, created on the spot and imbued with all the energy of the moment. In 1982 he participated in Documenta 7 in Kassel and held retrospective exhibitions at Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and other prominent venues in Europe. Vanderheyden passed away in 2012 in his native ‘s-Hertogenbosch. Today his works are in numerous public and private collections worldwide.

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