Sanders Jan

Jan Sanders is a Belgian artist, born in Aalst in 1936. He was a painter and draftsman. He was educated at the Academy in Aalst and continued his studies in 1957 at the Académie Libre of the city of Paris/France. He then went on to perfect himself at the Academy in Brussels. He debuted with intimistic works and evolved towards abstraction in the early 1960s. He discovered Pop Art and was influenced by the New American School. He became fascinated by the object or phenomenon 'car', which is often viewed from the front and wrapped in attractive, or call it poetic and glorifying colours. This is how large canvases were created and he ended up with hyperrealism. Sometimes the car is also fragmented into surprising compositions up to and including exposing the inner mechanism. The artist: “When I look into the headlights of my painted cars, I recognize my eyes, my fears, my dreams, my neighbour's suspicions” and “What I have with cars is probably the same as what Delvaux had with trains” . In 1967 he received a first mention at the Prize for Young Belgian Painting, together with P. Roobjee. Work by Jan Sanders was purchased by the State in 1958. Work by him can be found in the museums in Ostend and Aalst, in the collection of Autoworld in Brussels and in Rosmalen/the Netherlands. By 2001, commissioned by BIAC, he made a cycle of 25 paintings for the renovated airport of Zaventem. This cycle, from Icarus to satellites, is also found in philately. He is mentioned in BAS II and Two centuries of signatures of Belgian artists. (Piron, Randkrant, October 2000)