Naar aanleiding van het dertigjarig bestaan van Galerie Ronny Van de Velde duikt auteur Jan Ceuleers in haar kleurrijke geschiedenis. Vanaf midden jaren 1990, toen de kunstmarkt ten gevolge van de Golfoorlog door een diep dal ging, besliste Van de Velde om resoluut in te zetten op namen uit de historische avant-garde. Na een eerste retrospectieve van Marcel Duchamp groeide de galerie in enkele maanden tijd uit tot een selfmade museum met alles erop en eraan. Nadien volgden retrospectieven van...

In the space of a relatively short career, the painter, etcher and photographer Jozef Van Ruyssevelt (1941–1985) created a rich and intense body of work that is still far too little known. He excelled in his use of colour and chiaroscuro, his everyday surroundings providing an inexhaustible source of inspiration for him: furniture, utensils, plants, walls, windows, foliage, grass and the countryside beyond. Van Ruyssevelt’s style is marked by the same abrupt transitions that typified his ...

Kunstenaar José Vermeersch (1922-1997) staat bekend om zijn keramieken figuren van heterogene figuren. Hij was echter ook schilder, wever en ontwerper en creëerde een rijk oeuvre dat doordrongen is van zijn passie voor mensen, dieren en het leven.

Dit boek is een eerbetoon aan het ontstaan van het figuratieve werk van Vermeersch en laat, aan de hand van een honderdtal beelden en schilderijen, zien hoe zijn picturale en keramische oeuvre op een bijzondere manier met elkaar zijn verweven. He...

In 'Beyond Borders', the artist Isabel Miquel Arqués enters a dialogue with Karen Blixen (1885–1962), the Danish author whose best-known books, 'Out of Africa' and 'Babette’s Feast', were turned into successful movies. Arqués uses photographs, screen prints, and fragments of prose and poetry to link her own life with Blixen’s. She paid several visits to Rungstedlund, the author’s former home and now a museum, where she photographed objects that Blixen used every day. These triggered...

‘100MJ’ concerns an intuitive and personal drawing project about identity by Dutch artist Bas Kosters. The book shows a series of a hundred full page drawings based on the image of Michael Jackson. It is about how people are shaped trough the eyes of others, the reach of recognizability and identity. It plays with the ideas about visual culture and recognizability. In hundred portraits drawn on ephemera Kosters shows, in a poetic manner, man in all their strength.

Over the course of 202-2021, during the pandemic, Kara Walker has produced series of drawings in the style of a medieval 'Book of Hours'. Enigmatic images appear to traverse a range of time periods, from scenes of biblical and mythological origins, to images of historical violence, to others that suggest more recent political strife. The highly personal nature of these images capture Walker's own response to the intersection of past and present as a way to understand our contemporary politica...

Situated in the middle of the river Maas, between the northern and southern parts of Rotterdam, Noordereiland is shaped like a typical riverboat. Bart Lodewijks trekked from its western to its eastern end, making his drawings in chalk on commercial buildings, ship cabins, quay walls, houses, and steel pipes. He then wrote a poetic account of the life he encountered on the island, published in three parts. His presence as an outsider there elicited both questions and stories from the island’...

Batia Suter’s work intuitively situates found images in new contexts to provoke surprising reactions and significative possibilities. ‘Parallel Encyclopedia’, which she conceived between 2004 and 2007, contains a precise composition of numerous images taken solely from other books. Significant underlying themes expressed in the Amsterdam-based, Swiss artist’s practice are the “iconification” and “immunogenicity” of old images, and the circumstances by which they assume or beco...