Informal expressions
Opening: Sunday, 8 October 2023, 11 am - 5 pm
To mark the centenary year of the artist Maurice Wyckaert’s birth, the Roger Raveel Museum presents Informal Expressions. This exhibition brings together works made between 1955 and 1963 by Maurice Wyckaert (1923–1996) and Roger Raveel (1921–2013) who were contemporaries and friends. For both painters, this was a critical period of development in their oeuvres and in their lives. In their experiments with colour, brushstroke and format they sought to usher in a new, fresh and free kind of painting.
In the latter half of the 1950s, Roger Raveel let go of his familiar figurative elements and started painting ‘from the gut’ in an attempt to reconnect with nature. He took inspiration for this from the landscapes in and around Machelen-aan-de-Leie, the village where he was born. The museum presents a wide selection of seldom-exhibited works from its collection – works on canvas and on paper that attest to a love for painting, nature and the simple life. These pieces embody a great intensity, with compositions full of flowing lines and strokes, bright colour planes and the first appearances of Raveel’s famous square.
Maurice Wyckaert’s paintings and drawings likewise show a predilection for bright, often unmixed colours in conjunction with the lively, unctuous brushstrokes through which the artist expresses his restless nature. In contrast with Raveel, Wyckaert travelled and moved home a lot, always in search of a new living and working environment. The organic forms in his work arise not out of a tendency towards abstraction but rather from an attempt to shake off the established doctrines of painting. Wyckaert, like Raveel, is driven to seek out the essence of things. In this period, Wyckaert’s work is led by intuition, evolving from thick accumulations of paint to ‘landscapes’ that are fully allowed to breathe.