Raoul De Keyser: Early Works. Catalogue of Paintings 1964-1980
Steven Jacobs, Hilde D'haeyere (Eds.)
Koenig Books, 2024
€79,00
A leading exponent of European painting from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, Belgian artist Raoul De Keyser (1930-2012) started his career much earlier. This book focuses on De Keyser’s hitherto understudied early works, including a catalogue raisonné of the paintings made between 1964 and 1980.
Raoul De Keyser (1930-2012) started painting as a young man in the 1940s. Already in the early 1950s he breaks off his artistic career for a job as a civil servant and journalist. It was not until 1964 that he manifested himself again as an artist with works that initially evoke the new trends in figurative painting (Pop Art, nouveau réalisme), while later connecting to American modernism (Colorfield Painting, Post-Painterly Abstraction, Hard Edge). In the 1970s, De Keyser’s work shows strong similarities to both Minimal Art and Fundamental painting.
The exhibition at Vandenhove focuses on this early period in De Keyser’s work and consists of some twenty paintings never before exhibited or not shown since the 1960s and ’70s. In addition to several youthful works, the exhibition includes an exceptional selection of paintings from private collections, from works from the 1960s representative of the so-called New Vision to layered paintings from the 1970s. They display the familiar landscapes, rooms, chalk lines, tents and clouds, sometimes in surprising colors that differ from his more familiar works. Some paintings, moreover, seem to announce certain themes or sensibilities that were further developed later in his career. Together, they show a trajectory through the motifs, variations, repetitions and repaints that mark De Keyser’s entire oeuvre.
In addition to these never or rarely shown works, the exhibition includes pieces from Raoul De Keyser’s archive, which is part of the collection of the Central Library of Ghent University. Installation views, posters, leaflets, sketches and notes (many of which have never before been published) shed new light on De Keyser’s early artistic developments, highlighting, among other things, his activities as a sports journalist and art critic, his connections with Dutch museums and galleries, his affinities with graphic design, his studio as an exhibition space, and his unwavering interest in the “object character” of his paintings.
ISBN: 9783753305608
