GALERIE LAURENTIN

France & Belgium

23 quai Voltaire, 75007 Paris
Rue Ernest Allard 43, 1000 Bruxelles
Phone: +33 1 42 97 43 42
contact@galerie-laurentin.com
www.galerie-laurentin.com

Antoine Laurentin et son équipe parisienne : Caroline Joucquey Graziani à droite, Julie Vivier à gauche.

Antoine Laurentin comes from a family of collectors and was a collector himself long before turning his passion into the art dealing business. Antoine Laurentin opened his first gallery in 1991 rue Sainte-Anne in Paris.

Since 2004, the gallery is located 23 quai voltaire, and in 2013 gave birth to a second space in Brussels located street Ernest Allard.  Since its opening, the gallery Laurentin is specialised in Modern art, organizing monographic exhibitions with catalogues. Its participation with important fairs, such TEFAF in Maastricht, Art Brussels in Belgium, the Salon du Dessin and FAB PARIS in Paris, and Luxembourg Art Week, give an international visibility to the artists and the gallery.

Bram van VELDE (1895-1981), Composition, 1974, Gouache on paper

Bram van VELDE
Zoeterwoude (Pays-Bas) 1895 – Grimaud 1981

Composition

1974 Gouache on paper Signed at the bottom center. 101,5 x 74 cm

Provenance
Galerie Maeght Lelong
Pierre Hebey Collection

Preparatory work for lithography Mason Putman 267

 

The only artist who seems to establish a link between the Paris School and the American Abstract Expressionists, Bram van Velde can be compared to Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman in the United States, in the same radical questioning of gestures and forms after 1945.

Unlike his brother, he was one of those artists who felt the need to wipe the slate clean and start afresh. His work was solitary and sparse, on the fringes of all movements but with a chromatic richness and a rare formal unity.

Working with the idea that the artistic event must be experienced, Bram submits himself to an increasingly extensive, almost automatic gesture, and abandons himself to a brush that draws, without depth or relief, decomposing forms until they collapse and fade away.

The painting, more or less premeditated, is then offered up as a surface and as a fragmentation, solid aggregates whose incompleteness is made up of repentances and overloads.

This gouache painting, created in 1974, is clear and luminous. The colours used are vivid and transparent, enclosed in softly contoured shapes that articulate to create a play of tensions for the viewer’s gaze.

At the time this work was created, the artist was at the height of his fame and mastery of his pictorial language. It is a perfect illustration of the influence of Abstract Expressionism on a European artist such as Bram van Velde, who discovered this movement during his stay in New York, at a solo exhibition in 1948.

 

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