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Flemish artist Raoul De Keyser paints highly personal works that hover between abstraction and reality. His quiet but masterful presence has been an inspiration for generations of European painters – yet this is his first major survey in the UK and the largest exhibition of his work to date.
Like a series of haiku poems his beautiful compositions evoke fleeting impressions of the world – the network of veins on a leaf, bruised skin, the glimpse of a room - but they are all abstract. The roots of his work lie in both Pop Art and Minimalism. Inspired by everything from the architecture of his house near Ghent to the markings on football pitches, aeroplane vapour trails to clothes on a washing line, De Keyser’s subject matter is always close to home. At the same time his rigorous use of pure colour, line and space triggers both a physical and surprisingly emotional response.
The elegant simplicity of his paintings conceals the struggle and experiment embedded in every canvas, as colours are repainted and surfaces overlaid. ‘I don’t want to become the ‘pretty’ painter... Ultimately I want to paint ruthlessly’ (De Keyser, 2002). Featuring over 80 paintings from 1963 to the present day this retrospective charts Raoul De Keyser’s life-long engagement with the physicality of paint and the ephemerality of images.
Admission free
Raoul de Keyser has been co-organised by the Whitechapel Gallery; Musée de Rochechouart, France; De Pont Foundation, Tilburg, Netherlands; Fundação Serralves, Porto, Portugal; and Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, Switzerland.
Raoul De Keyser is funded by
Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation
With generous support from
Ministry for he Flemish Community
With kind assistance from
Belgian Embassy
Flanders House 'Flemish Representation'
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