Raoul De Keyser

December 17, 2022 – May 21, 2023

Friends in a Field: Conversations with Raoul De Keyser takes the late artist’s radical painterly practice as the beginning of a conversation with a diverse group of artists—both living and dead—whose works share a sensibility and attentiveness to the fragile intangibility of the world. In their paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, these artists join De Keyser in presenting the world back to us as a kind of abstract visual poetry.

Organized by Los Angeles-based guest curators Hanneke Skerath and Douglas Fogle in collaboration with Mu.ZEE curator Ilse Roosens, the exhibition includes works by Luc Tuymans, Richard Aldrich, Forrest Bess, Matt Connors, René Daniëls, Raoul De Keyser, Vincent Fecteau, Maysha Mohamedi, Rebecca Morris, Betty Parsons, Amy Sillman, Ricky Swallow, Patricia Treib, and Lesley Vance. 

Learn more at Mu.ZEE.

October 24–December 22, 2018

CC Strombeek in Belgium presented Raoul De Keyser in Print: Silkscreens, Lithographs, Linocuts, and Etchings, showcasing a lesser-known but integral part of the artist’s practice. In addition to creating evocative paintings and works on paper, De Keyser experimented with printing techniques over four decades. On view are forty-five works that not only reflect the formal and thematic evolution of De Keyser’s practice but also can be ordered more or less chronologically based on their techniques, which include silkscreens, lithographs, linocuts, and etchings.

De Keyser began making silkscreens in the late 1960s, at a moment when many artist were experimenting with printmaking in Europe and the United States. His first print was a silkscreen on cardboard: the box for Een verpakte gedachte (1967), a set of eleven poems by Roland Jooris (who would become a frequent collaborator) printed on cardboard sheets. De Keyser sent fragments of this work as postcards to friends. In the early 1970s, he shifted his focus to lithographs and started working more closely with the printers throughout the process to explore the different possibilities of various techniques. He primarily made linocuts during the 1980s and early 1990s. Later, he returned to silkscreen printing and made the only etching of his career, the beautifully sparse grid of Untitled (2004), over which he painted watercolor. The artist’s intuitive approach to painting is also apparent in his print works, which he sometimes rendered as unique pieces by intervening manually with watercolor. 

Raoul De Keyser in Print was co-curated by the art historian Steven Jacobs and Wouter De Vleeschouwer, whose graduate thesis focused on De Keyser’s prints and who also worked on the first posthumous survey of the artist’s oeuvre—an exhibition of over 120 paintings and more than 50 watercolors and drawings at S.M.A.K., Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, in Ghent (on view through January 27, 2019). The exhibition at CC Strombeek is accompanied by a catalogue written by Jacobs and De Vleeschouwer, with an essay and a catalogue raisonné of De Keyser’s prints.

Image: Installation view, Raoul De Keyser in Print: Silkscreens, Lithographs, Linocuts, and Etchings, CC Strombeek, Grimbergen, Belgium, 2018. Photo by Dirk Pauwels

April 5–September 8, 2019

Raoul De Keyser : oeuvre, organized by Senior Curator Martin Germann at S.M.A.K., Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, in Ghent, where the show was first presented in 2018, is the first major survey of the Belgian artist’s work since his passing in 2012. Opening at Pinakothek der Moderne, Sammlung Moderne Kunst in Munich on April 4, 2019, the show encompasses some one hundred paintings and more than fifty watercolors and drawings spanning De Keyser’s full career. A comprehensive catalogue includes texts by Martin Germann, Steven Jacobs, Luk Lambrecht, Bernhart Schwenk, and Philippe Van Cauteren, with artist contributions by Tomma Abts, Maria Eichhorn, Werner Feiersinger, Suzan Frecon, Mary Heilmann, Roland Jooris, Thomas Scheibitz, and James Welling.

Oeuvre seeks to explore the artist’s working process and his enduring experimentation with painting. Composed of basic but indefinable shapes and marks, his works often invoke spatial and figural illusions, though they remain elusive of any descriptive narrative. Reviewing the artist’s Whitechapel exhibition in Artforum in 2004, Barry Schwabsky wrote, "What makes De Keyser’s paintings so timely, so attractive to younger artists, may be their self-conscious vulnerability, their sense of unfoundedness and indifference to ‘the discourse.’"

Despite—or precisely because of—their sparse gesturing, De Keyser’s works convey a grandeur that inspires prolonged contemplation. Individually as well as collectively, his works revolve around the activity of painting, but also move beyond its physical means to become more than the sum of their parts. Their apparent simplicity belies a lengthy gestation period, which is guided largely by intuition rather than by following a preexisting plan. "Brain and heart crane to see over the shoulder of the eye," The New Yorker wrote in 2009, "when a willing viewer beholds De Keyser’s unassumingly perfect art."

Image: Raoul De Keyser, Gampelaere omgeving, 1967