Hardo

Who makes art about finance? I do. Dutch, blue-eyed, front office Managing Partner by day, Hardo by night. No dynastic trust fund — parents had a focus on learning instead of earning. I did inherit curiosity, and was fortunate to have the FT on the mat daily. That fuelled my desire to understand global moneyflows.

At 11, I convinced my parents to let me open an online account. Luck, hubris, riding the dotcom wave and buying a racing bike later — it had lit the fuse.

In 2018 I founded Hardo & Co — a fictive "European boutique investment bank that is lean like David and slays deals like Goliath." I created it as a virtual art studio, for which I am simultaneously the intern, Associate, VP, and Managing Art Director. I spend my nights creating intricate, intelligent, and at times sardonic worlds of haute fihnance art.

From insider vantage to vintages. From a decade as jack of all trades between M&A, PE, VC, and advisory — to now running P&L as Partner at a niche commodities trading firm in New York.

I don't study the worlds of finance from the outside; I partake in it every day. Leverage, price discovery, time to market, downturns — I engage with the machinery of money and know the hunger of chasing its glossy peaks. This 'participant observation' fuels the artworks: admiring, satirical, informed.

Under pseudonym Hardo & Co, I am on my path to producing 200+ large works across the worlds of haute finance. With PowerPoint as my main canvas, my works celebrate and ridicule in the same slide — boasting love letters to banking, markets, trading, monetary policy, but not blind to their absurdities. If you know, you know.

Following a coffee-table book in 2019, focus shifted to larger artworks for serious walls — for those who move serious size. My debut series 'Haute Fihnance 101' consists of twelve works, each sold as editions capped at 7–10 numbered versions, priced progressively higher. Like in life, early entrants de-risk the later ones.

I have conviction and inspiration for a lifetime at least.