True Copy

On May 6 1994 the gendarmes break into Geert Jan Jansen’s French country estate, where they find more than 1600 works by the likes of Picasso, Dali, Appel, Matisse and Hockney. Striking detail: most of them have actually been painted by the Dutchman. 

For more than twenty years, Jansen has managed to fool the art world, so convincingly so that Picasso and Appel themselves unwittingly provided certificates of authenticity for his creations. ‘I do not deceive, I relieve,’ he says about himself. ‘I reckon I’ve relieved them of a heap of work.’

To this day, museums worldwide are exhibiting works by Geert Jan which nobody would single out as forgeries. A spelling mistake eventually lays bare Geert Jan Jansen’s illicit activity and the German police arrests him. In the shadow of the great masters, Jansen has honed his craft over the years. His work and life form a balancing act on the tightrope between fiction and reality.

In True Copy BERLIN shows the internal cogwheels that keep this complex man ticking, as a manual for laying bare – amongst other things – the hypocrisy inside the art world. What does authenticity really mean?

True Copy was part of the selection of Het TheaterFestival (2019).