Terminus : Drawings (1979-1982) and Recent Paintings

by de Keyser, Raoul

• ISBN13: 9783869300542
• ISBN10: 386930054X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-08-15
• Publisher: Innovative Logistics Llc

Summary

This book documents the artists 2009 exhibition at David Zwirner in New York. Featured are 50 works, which make up two complementary bodies of work: recent paintings (most from 2008 to 2009) and drawings (created from 1979 to 1982 made on different types of paper and in diverse media, including pencil, ink, watercolour, acrylic, and oil chalk). Modest in size, his spare works have a special intimacy that derives from the physical characteristics of the medium itself, as well as the tension created between plane and depth, figure and ground. Born in 1930 in Deinze, Belgium (where he still lives), De Keyser is one of Europes leading painters, yet only over the past two decades has he received much-deserved attention outside his native land. Like many European artists to come of age after World War II, De Keysers career began tacitly negotiating developments in American high modernism, from abstract expressionism through minimalism. He was included in the 2007 Venice Biennale, curated by Robert Storr, and from 2004 to 2005, he was the subject of a major solo retrospective exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery, which traveled to Musée de Rochechouart, De Pont Museum for Contemporary Art, Museu Serralves, and Kunstverein St. Gallen Kunstmuseum. Co-published with David Zwirner, New York.

Author Biography

For nearly fifty years, Raoul De Keyser (1930-2012) created subtly evocative paintings and works on paper which appear at once straightforward and cryptic, abstract and figurative. Composed of basic but indefinable shapes and marks, his works often invoke spatial and figural illusions, though they remain elusive of any descriptive narrative. Despite—or precisely because of—their sparse gesturing, De Keyser’s works convey a grandeur that inspires prolonged contemplation. Individually as well as collectively, his works revolve around the activity of painting, but also move beyond its physical means to become more than the sum of their parts. Their apparent simplicity belies a lengthy gestation period, which is guided largely by intuition, rather than by following a pre-existing plan.