The Nascent Years: 1941-1960

From Wednesday 1 July, the Roger Raveel Museum presents a new collection presentation. The Nascent Years: 1941-1960 includes a selection of rarely shown paintings and drawings from the period in which the young Roger Raveel (1921-2013) is looking for his own signature and position as a painter. The exhibition tries, averse to chronology, to expose the versatile experiment of Raveel's budding oeuvre. The daring palette of colors and techniques is already unmistakably present in controlled compositions in which the artist tries to capture the complexity of reality. A concrete wall in the garden, a coffee pot on the table, the farmer plowing his field: the protagonists from Raveel's universe - the village on the Leie where he lived and worked all his life - appear early on as motifs in his painterly research. During these two decades, the painter's attention shifts systematically from a figurative to an abstract visual language in an attempt to capture atmosphere, light and "mental space". The exhibition is a first step in the further investigation and broader access to the museum collection in the coming years.