Henricus Petrus Cornelis (Kees) Verschuren (born Breda, 29 August 1941[1]) is a Dutch sculptor, painter and former lecturer at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam, known for his monumentalist sculptures in public places in the Netherlands.

[2] Born in Princenhage, a neighbourhood in the southwest of the city Breda, Verschuren graduated from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague in 1965-66.

He and portrait painter Dick Stapel were the only two students, that finished the full-time program in Visual Arts that year.

In 1973 Verschuren was appointed lecturer at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam in the department of autonomous art, where he taught in concept development.

[6] He is member of the Arti et Amicitiae art society in Amsterdam,[8] and has received scholarships from the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport in 1974,[9] and from the Mondriaan Fonds [nl] in 2003.

In January 1969, with the other two art teachers Lode Pemmelaar[14] and Bep van de Akker, he was fired for holding a survey among their students about their sexual experiences.

[15][16] The teachers had been popular among their pupils for taking the classes to exhibitions of Robert Rauschenberg, Picasso and Hieronymus Bosch.

Late 1968 they had asked the school director permission to visit the movie Barbarella (film) for their art class.

In a period of over five years, adjacent to a power plant, the artists developed an area into the largest work of art in the Netherlands in those days.

The Regional Historical Center Eindhoven (2015) recalled about this project: The percentage scheme for art in government buildings was applicable here.

Perhaps that was the reason that the new owner of the artwork in 1996 carried it away as scrap...[25]Furthermore, in 1977 in cooperation with the architect and painter Hubert de Boer (born 1937) and sculptor and architect Coen Wilderom (born 1944), Pennock and Verschuren developed an urban sketch design for the Bezuidenhout, a part of the Haagse Hout district in The Hague.

In this district Pennock, Verschuren and light designer Crista van Santen[26] produced a sculpture made of painted steel and neon, which was realised in 1982s.

[28] Late 1980s Verschuren also developed a concept for the public space for the municipality of The Hague; a redesign of the balloon loop area at the end of the tram line 11 [nl] in Scheveningen.

The circular island, that lies in the Grote Dobbe lake in Zoetermeer, is decorated with iron objects and hedges which are shaped fragments of circles.

Typical of Verschuren's sculpture is that his iron objects, mostly of steel, simply seems to have cut out, bent and folded to the inside or to the outside.

[32] In 1989 in Rotterdam Verschuren realized the monumental sculpture "Sjatoodoo," Dutch pronunciation of the French Chateau d Eau.

Complexity was sought after: the work combines the arts of painting - sculpture - architecture as a visually rich cultural statement within a megalomaniac technological environment - from some distance it shows as a strong construction like so many objects in the world's largest harbour.