De Keersmaecker Robert

Robert De Keersmaecker is a Belgian artist, born in Bornem in 1955. He is a painter and graphic artist and received his training at the Academy in Sint-Niklaas under the guidance of A. Roelant. In 1978 he was selected for “Line/Colour/Volume”. He was active within the group around the De Nieuwe Tijd gallery in Sint-Niklaas and exhibited in 2007 at the Dagmar De Pooter gallery in Antwerp. At the time, the press described his work as follows: “R.D.K. looks at the world with both a painterly and a photographic eye. What may at first seem to be merely representational paintings of façades and shop windows are in fact slow constructions, built up from a rich visual experience and an untiring process of repainting. During his walks, R.D.K. notices remarkable things: yellow-painted side walls, leaning letterboxes and prohibition signs. They are added to the many images he has been carrying with him for years. Trivial details fascinate him enormously, leading him to capture them in numerous photographs. Later, he analyses these images, zooms in on them, searching for ever more detail. A fascination with the skewed and the absurd, with false perspective on the one hand, and a great love of paint, colour and material on the other, make these works what they are: at once precise and nonchalant, studied and naïve, humorous and serious.” (J.B.) Robert De Keersmaecker is listed in BAS II and Two Centuries of Signatures of Belgian Artists. (Piron)