Pierre Vlerick

The Isle of the Phoenix, Oil on canvas by Pierre Vlerick (1923–1999)

1963-1965

This painting is a perfect example of lyrical abstraction and a choice painting out of the best period of Vlerick's career. Signed and titled by the artist. Pierre Vlerick...

This painting is a perfect example of lyrical abstraction and a choice painting out of the best period of Vlerick's career. Ineffable, 1962 Oil on Masonite board 91,5 x 61,5 cm (without frame) 93 x 63 cm (framed) Signed and dated Top Right ‘P. Vlerick 1962’ with title, signature place and date at the back: Ineffable P. Vlerick Afsnee 1962 Pierre Vlerick’s work shows some resemblance to Willem de Kooning’s. While the Dutch American was famed for the wild manner in which he treated his canvas, Pierre Vlerick showed some more restraint, but making a painting was in any case a slow process of stopping and starting and revising. His exploration is meant to result in a correct proportion of colour fields and streaks, often applied layer upon layer. All his colors have a luminous intensity. It was mainly Bonnard’s colorful work that inspired Vlerick to compose his own singular range of colors of slightly tingling yellows, greens, oranges and bits of blue here and there. Abstraction is emphasized by his use of color. Colors not associated with objects from daily life often dominate the composition: purple, for instance. This is the basis for his continuing abstraction, ending up as color fields combined with organic elements depicted with the vaguest of contours. Though both artists create a very metropolitan, say even worldly art, their work evokes nature. De Kooning has been called a master of ‘abstract landscape’. The structure of Vlerick’s works, too, is very vegetable and organic. No wonder he referred to his paintings as his ‘gardens’. Neither artist allowed his garden to remain empty: de Kooning created a female figure looking like a cross between a floozy and the mother goddess. Vlerick imagined a woman who is enjoying her body. Vlerick’s approach to abstract art is the same as de Kooning’s; they refuse to paint in a figurative manner, yet at the same time do not wish to renounce referring to reality. De Kooning once put it very accurately during an interview when he conceded that painting the human figure any longer was absurd(in the post-war period), but also stated that it would be even more absurd not to do it. The only way out of this ambiguous dilemma is the deconstruction of the human figure. Not in order to reject it, but to show it in all its fragility. Pierre Vlerick’s exceptional artistic talents were already recognized while he was studying at the Ghent Academy (1940-1944) whereupon graduating he received a gold medal. In 1947-1948 Vlerick enrolls at the “la Grande Chaumière Academy”, a Parisian private academy which attracts lots of foreign artists thanks to the reputation of its most important teachers such as Maurice Denis (1870-1943). Denis was one of the founding fathers of “the Nabis” and is also considered to be the godfather of abstract art by many artists and art critics. Maurice Denis is famous for his quote: "Remember that a painting, before it is any kind of representation, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors in a certain collected order." At La Grande Chaumière, Vlerick is challenged to develop a pictorial language of his own. Vlerick develops a way to translate the observed reality into visions of color and form, which can be situated somewhere on the axis between the figurative and the abstract. Reality is decomposed and reconstructed into a complete new representation. After a trip to Spain in 1955 the painter evolves towards the use of brighter colors. At the Brussels World Exhibition of 1958 (Expo 58) Vlerick is for the first time confronted with real works of 17 American artists (William Baziotes, James Brooks, Sam Francis, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Grace Hartigan, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Theodoros Stamos, Clyfford Still, Bradley Walker...

This painting is a perfect example of lyrical abstraction and a choice painting out of the best period of Vlerick's career. Geen nachtschade (No Nightshade), 1962 Oil on Masonite board 121 x 61 cm (without frame) 136 x 75 cm (framed) Signed and dated bottom left ‘P. Vlerick 1962’& with title, signature place and date at the back Pierre Vlerick...

This luminous coastal landscape, depicting the Calanche rock formations of Corsica, reveals a lesser-known but deeply resonant dimension of Paul Justin Marcel Balmigère’s artistic id...

Oil on canvas, signed lower left. Gérard Souzay (né Gérard Marcel Tisserand le 8 décembre 1918 à Angers, Maine-et-Loire, et mort le 17 août 2004 à Antib...

Sven Inge Höglund (1935 - 2008), Swedish artist. Oil on canvas. Abstract composition. 1960s / 70s. The canvas measures: 40.5 x 33 cm. The frame measures:...

John von Wicht (German American, 1888-1970) "On Blue" 1964 Oil and acrylic on canvas Hand signed lower right "V. Wicht", Hand signed, titled, and dated on the stretcher "1964-66" D...

Excellent example of a large oil on canvas abstraction by Fred Hocks from 1957. This painting was included in the 1976 retrospective at the Fine Arts Gallery in San Diego which later became the San Diego Museum of Art. No painter embodies San Diego’s early avant-garde more than Fred (Ferdinand) Hocks, a German-born painter who began visiting San Diego in the late 1920s after studies at the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco and the Art Students League in New York. Fellow painter Dan Dickey credited Hocks in 1947 with “opening up pathways for future, more enlightened generations (of artists),” and predicted that Fred Hocks would be “esteemed a master.” During the post-war years Hocks was assistant director of the San Diego School of Arts and Crafts, a private art school in La Jolla, and was instrumental in keeping affordable artist’s studios in Spanish Village. Along with modern architect Lloyd Ruocco, Fred Hocks co-founded the dynamic Allied Artists Council with Belle Baranceanu, Everett Gee Jackson, Dan Dickey and John Olsen. The well-travelled Hocks exhibited in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Pasadena, Paris, Mallorca and Guadalajara, had several one-person shows at the Art Center La Jolla/La Jolla Museum of Art and at the Fine Arts Gallery (SDMA). The San Diego Museum of Art held a major retrospective of his painting in 1976, just a few years before his death. He brought a continental element to the local art scene and is described in Bruce Kamerling’s 100 Years of Art in San Diego as “one of the most adventurous local artists…an intelligent and articulate defender of modern tendencies in art.” Local arts and architecture writer James Britton called Fred Hocks “the dean of the San Diego moderns...