The Belgian painter Ilse D’Hollander died in 1997 at the age of twenty-nine, and her work has seldom been exhibited since. She began painting in Ghent, where her earliest works were still lifes and portraits inspired by Cézanne and Nicolas de Staël. Her close relationship with her mentor Raoul De Keyser, an abstract painter who favored a style that was at once intuitive, economical, and ever so subtly referential, preceded (and predicted) her gradual transition to a similar brand of abstraction around 1995, about the same time that she moved a half hour’s drive outside of Ghent to the rural town