Raoul de Keyser
Whitechapel Gallery
77 - 82 Whitechapel High Street
March 20–May 23, 2004
Fondacao de Serralves
Rua de Serralves
January 15–April 30, 2005
Musée de Rochechouart
June 6–August 8, 2004
Kunstmuseum St. Gallen
Museumstrasse 32
August 8–August 9, 2004
De Pont Museum
Wilhelminapark 1
September 11, 2004–January 9, 2005
Curated by Hendrik Driessen, Ulrick Loock, and Anthony Spira
Raoul de Keyser bloomed late in Belgium, beginning an astonishing forty-year career at the age of thirty-five. The curators have put together fifty paintings from the early ’70s forward, mixing older works among recent ones. The largely abstract canvases often begin with a simple, domestic image overlaid with gesture, monochrome, or a grid. For de Keyser, who explores painting’s expanse rather than cataloguing its finite categories, nothing is inevitable, and many things seem possible—a state of affairs that feels right, right now.