Joop Verhagen

Joop Verhagen, after his stay in a Tilburg children's home, Joop Verhagen (Someren 1942) was initially trained as a house painter. He then attended the publicity department at the Sint Joost Academy in Breda and the Academy of Art and Industry in Enschede. He was a photographer in the army. There he also started boxing and became Dutch military champion in the middleweight. Subsequently, Verhagen was a circus artist, dock worker, bouncer and had an advertising agency for a while. This striking Tilburg native has been profiling himself as a visual artist since the 1960s and has received the necessary attention since the 1990s, because he always exhibits his abstract paintings in a different place in the city. He also had his Galerie Joop at various locations, where he also gave colleagues the opportunity to sell their artworks. Verhagen has been presenting himself as a therapist for several years, using the Sufi Enneagram as a guideline.