Raoul de Keyser: Terminus

David Zwirner is pleased to present Terminus: Drawings (1979-1982) and Recent Paintings, Raoul De Keyser’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery.

Currently on view until October 18th, Replay: Paintings 1964-2007 at Kunstmuseum Bonn is the first comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work in Germany. Comprised of 50 works spanning over 40 years, this extensive exhibition brings together loans from museums and private owners in Europe and America. Also on view, until September 20th, is an exhibition at the Museum voor Schone Kunsten/Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium. Last year, De Keyser donated 187 works on paper (made from 1964 to 1979) to the museum, and this exhibition displays the entire gift. This extraordinary collection illustrates the artist’s evolution from figurative work to the abstract compositions for which he is now known.

Featured at David Zwirner are 50 works, made up of two complementary bodies of work: drawings (various works on paper) and paintings. Created from 1979 to 1982, the drawings – made on different types of paper and in diverse media, including pencil, ink, watercolor, acrylic, and oil chalk – continue the lineage of the work currently on view in Ghent. The paintings, made from 2000 to 2009, include such seminal works as Across (2000/2009), Drift (2008), and Complex (2009).

Born in 1930 in Deinze, Belgium (where he still lives), Raoul De Keyser is one of Europe’s leading painters, yet only over the past two decades has he received much-deserved attention outside his native Belgium. Like many European artists to come of age after World War II, De Keyser’s career began tacitly negotiating developments in American high modernism, from abstract expressionism through minimalism. He gained notoriety during the 1960s as part of Nieuwe Visie (New Vision), a group of painters that included Roger Raveel, Etienne Elias, and Reinier Lucassen.

Enjoying a long-standing reputation as being a ‘painter’s painter,’ De Keyser has been a leading influence on the next generation of painters, including Luc Tuymans, Rebecca Morris, and Tomma Abts. Modest in size, De Keyser’s 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.

Raoul de Keyser
Terminus
Drawings (1979-1982) and Recent Paintings