Raoul De Keyser: Early Works. Catalogue of Paintings 1964-1980

Edited by Steven Jacobs and Hilde D’haeyere

Texts by Steven Jacobs, Hilde D’haeyere, Wouter De Vleeschouwer, Benedict Vandaele, and Klaartje Van Thuyne

Language: English / ISBN: 978-3-7533-0560-8

One of the leading exponents 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 an illustrated catalogue raisonné of the 383 paintings he made between 1964 and 1980. De Keyser started painting as a teenager in the 1940s, but he halted his artistic career in the early 1950s, becoming a civil servant and an arts and sports journalist. Only in 1964 did he take up painting again with works initially resonating with contemporaneous trends in figurative painting (Pop Art, Nouveau réalisme) as well as with American modernism (Color-Field Painting, Post-Painterly Abstraction, Hard Edge). In the 1970s, De Keyser’s idiom evolved into a more abstract and subdued style, closely related to Minimal Art and so-called Systemic or Fundamental Painting. Based on extensive archival research, this book contains a wealth of artworks, installation views, posters, leaflets, sketches, and documents never before published. In so doing, it throws new light on De Keyser’s artistic development, investigating his constant balance between abstraction and figuration, his playful take on the everyday, his fascination for the tactility and objecthood of his canvases, and his never-ending experiments with recycling earlier compositions in new contexts.

This publication was made possible thanks to the generous support of Zeno X Gallery Antwerp, David Zwirner Gallery New York, Barbara Weiss Gallery Berlin, Ghent University Central Library, and the Dekeyser family