Raoul De Keyser

Raoul De Keyser’s painterly, imagistic artworks reflect concerns in painting that arose in 1970s: how to keep painting vital as Conceptualism, video, and performance art rose in prominence, and how to navigate the relationship between abstraction and representation after Minimalism and Pop. De Keyser’s work is suggestive and evocative, but is rarely concretely representational. Rather, with a few simple brush marks, often composed with studies made of colored paper, de Keyser could conjure an abstraction reminiscent of a landscape or figure. His gentle touch and muted, light colors are delicate but firm. De Keyser’s 1971−72 oil painting Untitled is made with only two green color fields, one light and one dark. An off-white line running diagonally across the painting’s upper left bisects those two wavering fields.

De Keyser was little known outside of his native Belgium until the late 1980s. Roberta Smith wrote of his career that, “Mr. De Keyser became one of the most respected painters of his time, but slowly.” His work has been included in Documenta, the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paolo Biennial, among others. He has been given numerous major retrospectives over the past twenty years, including the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, Germany, Whitechapel Gallery in London, and the De Pont Museum for Contemporary Art in the Netherlands.