Raoul De Keyser - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Wednesday, October 2, 2019 | Phillips

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  • Video

    Raoul de Keyser, 'Kabinet', Lot 32

    20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 2 October 2019

  • Provenance

    Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp
    Acquired from the above by the present owner in June 1990

  • Exhibited

    Breda, Museum De Beyerd, Beeldenstorm 1990, 25 March - 6 May 1990, pl. 1, n.p. (illustrated)
    Kunsthalle Bern; Portikus Frankfurt am Main, Raoul de Keyser, 8 May - 29 September 1991, no. 587, p. 47 (illustrated)
    Ghent, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Luc Tuymans and Raoul De Keyser, 3 February - 25 March 2001

  • Literature

    Steven Jacobs, ed., Raoul De Keyser: Paintings 1980-1999, Ghent, 2000, no. 587, p. 149 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Spanning post-painterly Abstraction, Hard-Edge, Minimal Art and Pop art, Raoul de Keyser’s creations are inscribed within multiples histories of Modern Art, echoing a number of seminal academic and painterly manifestations that artists and theorists developed to anchor their respective movements within a clear artistic vision. Building on Theo van Doesburg’s neo-plasticist principles outlined in his 1925 manifesto, de Keyser’s Kabinet, 1989-90, reflects the Dutch artist’s insistent claim that the external world is revealed through ‘colours, forms, lines and planes’ as opposed to ‘arms, legs, trees and landscapes’ (Theo van Doesburg, 'Principles of Neo-Plastic Art', Bauhausbuch, vol. 6, Munich, 1925). The painting, juxtaposing varyingly-sized blocks of grey, red, ochre and black, serves as a radical study in space that prodigiously attends to the formal codes deployed by de Keyser’s eminent predecessor.

    Yet while Kabinet’s composition is firmly – almost assertively – non-representational, its title suggests an allusion to the figurative and real. Known to borrow freely from his everyday life to subsequently venture into the realm of abstraction, de Keyser here endows Kabinet with layered slabs of colour that, in conjunction with the title, become evocative of the titular furniture’s multiple drawers. The blocks’ disjointed arrangement – all placed at different levels of the picture plane – further emphasises the work’s exportation to the phenomenological, signifying movement and a departure from the strictness of the two-dimensional plane.

Property of a Distinguished Collector

32

Kabinet

signed and dated ‘Raoul de Keyser (1989) -1990’ on the reverse
oil on canvas
158 x 140 cm (62 1/4 x 55 1/8 in.)
Painted in 1989-90.

Estimate
£100,000 - 150,000 

Sold for £162,500

Contact Specialist

Olivia Thornton
Senior Director
Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Europe
+44 20 7318 4099
othornton@phillips.com

 

Rosanna Widén
Director, Senior Specialist
+44 20 7318 4060
rwiden@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

London Auction 2 October 2019