ART ANTWERP 2023

Irène Laub Gallery is delighted to present a solo show by Belgian artist Bernard Villers.
His practice questions the relationship between surface, light and colour, creating never-ending combinations and unexpected effects through the interaction between those essential elements. His gestures, brought by a decades-long process of experimentation in the studio, are simple and clearly visible, everything is shown with complete openness. The Belgian painter seeks his inspiration in banal, marginal and imperceptible aspects of everyday experience to create chromatic interventions often inspired by language, poetry or literature. His sensitive and sometimes mischievous approach to painting produced several seminal series that are at the same time linked to the contemporaneous Support/Surfaces research and precursor to future experimentations.

Born in 1939 in Brussels, Bernard Villers is a major figure of Belgian abstraction. He studied monumental painting at La Cambre with Paul Delvaux and Jo Delahaut, then silkscreen printing at l’Ecole des Arts et Métiers in Brussels, before becoming a teacher himself at La Cambre. His presence in the Belgian art scene since the seventies has been very influential and he developed a cohesive, thought-provoking and playful body of work. He created his own publishing house in 1975, Edition du Remorqueur, through which he publishes his artist’s books.
His artworks are present in the collections of FRAC Bretagne, Rennes (FR), FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon (FR), Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (FR), Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (BE), Centre de la Gravure, La Louvière (BE), Fondation Gordon Matta-Clark, Antwerp (BE), Collection FWB, Brussels (BE), Musée d’Ixelles, Brussels (BE), Musée royal de Mariemont, Morlanwelz (BE), Serralves, Porto (PT), Werserburg Museum, Bremen (DE), among others.

CHECK OUT THE VIEWING ROOM HERE

Preview Thursday 14.12, 11am > 4pm
Opening Thursday 14.12, 4pm > 9pm
Friday 15.12, 11am > 7pm
Saturday 16.12, 11am > 7pm
Sunday 17.12, 11am > 7pm

Location
Antwerp Expo
Jan van Rijswijcklaan 191
2020 Antwerp (BE)

More info about Bernard Villers