The KMSKA celebrates Bert De Leeuw with an intimate homage
From 11 June, visitors will be able to engage with the exhibition Bert De Leeuw. What Appears, Disappears in the Print Room of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA). To mark the centenary of the Antwerp artist’s birth, the museum is highlighting De Leeuw's remarkable career within post-war Belgian art. Discover an intriguing body of work and thought process in which matter, numbers and existential questions converge.
With this captivating exhibition, the KMSKA showcases not only Bert De Leeuw’s unique visual language: owing to the exceptional curation by his son Hendrik, visitors also gain an insight into his creative spirit. In De Leeuw’s art, geometric and organic forms merge into serene works with an almost meditative power. These works did not go unnoticed. During his lifetime, he exhibited internationally and came into contact with artists such as Francis Bacon and Lucio Fontana.
With this exhibition, the KMSKA is firmly putting this idiosyncratic artist from Antwerp on the map. Thanks to a particularly personal creative process, this retrospective brings visitors closer to De Leeuw’s oeuvre than ever before
A 'material artist' through and through
Having grown up in Antwerp’s Zuid district, De Leeuw soon developed a fascination with materials and light. From the late 1950s onwards, he created his distinctive material paintings, in which he mixed paint with sand, coal ash and bitumen. The gouges in the reliefs are not abstract but refer to humanity and the traces that life leaves in its wake. These kinds of existential questions form a common thread running through his oeuvre and the exhibition.
I stand here. I disappear. My void remains behind.
The exhibition shows how his experiments with texture quickly evolved into bronze sculpture. Furthermore, with the advent of computers in the 1970s, he developed a fascination with numbers, sequences and combinations. Not as a rational system, but as a way of coming to terms with the uncertainties of existence. The result is a series of sculptural modules offering an infinite number of possible combinations.
Alongside sculptures and paintings, Bert De Leeuw What Appears, Disappears also features preparatory sketches, chalk drawings, terracotta models, gold collages and drawings on tracing paper.
A personal scenography
In the intimate chambers of the Print Room, visitors are immersed in a tranquil and calming atmosphere. Thanks to the collaboration with his son Hendrik De Leeuw, the exhibition offers not only a comprehensive museum presentation but also a personal encounter with his father’s oeuvre.
This layout is in line with Bert De Leeuw’s philosophy of life. His work explores the elusive meaning of life. He responded to that quest by exploring painting, sculpture, scenography and architectural concepts in his own unique way
