Raoul de Keyser: Recent Work

In 2004, De Keyser was the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, England, which traveled to the Musée de Rochechouart, Rochechouart, France; De Pont Museum for Contemporary Art, Tilburg, The Netherlands; Fundãçao Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporãnea, Porto, Portugal; and Kunstverein St. Gallen Kunstmuseum, St. Gallen, Switzerland (all 2004). Other important solo exhibitions include S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium (2001); The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2000); and Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern, Switzerland (1999). De Keyser has participated in numerous prestigious group exhibitions, including LUZ, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium (2005); Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof, Hamburger Banhof-Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany (2004); Painting on the Move, Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland (2002); Mixing Memory and Desire, Neues Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern, Switzerland (2000); and Der zerbrochene Spiegel. Positionen zur Malerei, Messepalast & Kuntsthalle, Vienna, Austria (traveled to Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany) (1992). Born in 1930, Raoul de Keyser is one of Europe s leading painters. In the mid-1960s, he was a member of Nieuwe Visie (New Vision), a group of painters who sought to reinvigorate certain aspects of European formalism by taking ordinary subjects and reducing them to simple flat shapes and lines. Having exhibited widely since then, de Keyser gained international recognition at Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany in 1992. He is known in Belgium as the father of contemporary painting, and his work has greatly influenced a generation of younger artists such as Tomma Abts, Rebecca Morris, and Luc Tuymans. Throughout the 1970s, De Keyser explored compositions based on the corner of a soccer field, a motif begun with a chalk powder outline at the Groninger Museum in The Netherlands. Using an abstract language with echoes of Abs