TERRY Brett is giving his Pyramid Gallery in Stonegate, York, a new look for the solo show by Koert Linde, a Dutch artist now living in York.

“The exhibition features just paintings by Koert, and they have profound messages and need space to give voice, so we’ve moved all the plinths out of the main exhibition room,” says Terry.

“The gallery looks and feels very different. I think visitors will be pleasantly surprised.”

The exhibition is entitled Mysteries 2013. “One critic once called these paintings ‘an archaeology of the mind’; others have called them gothic or mythical,” says Koert. “I prefer to call them metaphysical ‘mysteries’.”

“Daily we are assaulted by images, easily produced, widely reproduced, acted upon, but soon forgotten, discarded, and thrown away. So why still look at paintings, and why continue to make them in the same way, slowly, thoughtfully, applying craft and imagination to the task? Because it is absurd. Probably.

“Or perhaps because paintings are a form of contemplation, a kind of dreaming with your eyes wide open, a barricade against the onslaught of history.”

Koert applies “careful observation, memory, mythology and play to the task of awakening wonder and disquiet”.

“So that paintings build a swallow’s nest in your mind, or burrow a fox’s lair beneath your feet; so they liberate your reveries, dig up the buried and forgotten, or puzzle you with their enigmas. But whatever you think you see, don’t ask for an explanation,” he says.

Koert Linde was born in the Netherlands and studied painting and printmaking at De Vrije Akademie in The Hague. Since the late 1970s, he has worked mainly as an artist, exhibiting his paintings regularly in Holland, Britain and elsewhere, sometimes in partnership with musicians, including York singer-songwriter David Ward Maclean.

From 1988 to 1995, his work was represented by the Nicholas Treadwell Gallery and his art can be found in private collections across Europe.

In 2007 he was commissioned to paint the Stations of the Cross for the St Nicolaas van Tolentijn Church in Witmarsum, Friesland.

He also has written poetry and prose in English. Nailings, his first book of poems, was published in 1997 by Chapman, followed by Ananke in 1999. Knucker Press published a selection of 14 paintings by Koert, alongside poems by Jane McKie, in 2010.

Tomorrow, he will attend the 6pm private viewing of an exhibition that draws on three series of paintings.

“Witnesses is inspired by the ancient Greek Eleusinian mysteries, a religious cult devoted to Demeter and Persephone,” he says. “Icons is a modern face projected on to ancient sacred texts dedicated to saints, goddesses and legends, while Melancholia features playful variations on the Renaissance and Baroque Vanitas paintings of skulls and symbols of the passage of time.”

• Koert Linde’s Mysteries 2013 exhibition will run at Pyramid Gallery, York, from tomorrow until October 1.