at Sean Kelly TEFAF New York 2025, Stand 330
Ilse D’Hollander - TEFAF
Ilse D’Hollander
Head-Image
“Ilse D'Hollander's ultimate work proves that ‘innovation’ is no longer necessary as a criterion of quality, but that the artist has to strive for authenticity. Ilse D'Hollander's oeuvre is part of the final chapter of twentieth- century painting, not because of its radical nature, but because of the freedom with which she experimented with paint and brush. She makes a personal synthesis of what art means to her. In her own way, she breathes new life into a medium that seemed to be suffocated by the urge for innovation.”
-Excerpt from A Painterly Existence by Tanguy Eeckhout, one of the essays from M Museum Leuven 2013 publication.
Ilse D’Hollander (Belgian, b. 1968 Sint-Niklaas - d. 1997 Ghent)
Untitled, 1992
gouache on paper
paper: 12 3/8 x 9 1/4 inches (31.5 x 23.5 cm)
framed: 24 7/8 x 20 3/4 x 1 3/4 inches (63.2 x 52.7 x 4.4 cm)
work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity
signed by Ric Urmel, Executor of the Estate
(IDH-WP.OT65)
Provenance:
The artist’s estate and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles.
Exhibitions:
Sean Kelly New York, Ilse D’Hollander: The Color of Shadows, June 27–August 7, 2024.
Sean Kelly Los Angeles, Ilse D’Hollander: A Harmony Parallel to Nature, November 11, 2023–January 13, 2024.
Installation view of Ilse D’Hollander: The Color of Shadows at Sean Kelly, New York, June 27 – August 2, 2024, Photography: Adam Reich.
Created during a very brief period, from 1989 until her early, unexpected and tragic death at the age of 29, Ilse D’Hollander’s oeuvre exhibits a highly developed sense of color, composition, scale and surface, through the use of subtle tones and pared down compositions. An artist’s artist, her canvases and works on paper favor abstraction, yet subtly allude to the everyday, hinting at nature and the landscape of the Flemish countryside where she spent the last and most productive years of her life.
D’Hollander’s subtly evocative canvases have drawn comparisons to work as various as that of early Piet Mondrian, Nicolas de Staël and Raoul De Keyser – whom she regarded as a friend – her work is distinguished by its contemplative tranquility, ethereal quality and brilliant, deceptive simplicity. The intimate scale of her canvases invites the viewer to embrace a highly personal relationship with the work, where multiple layers of paint, visible brushstrokes and trembling lines of color reveal D’Hollander’s tangible and sensual exploration of the act of painting. In the only text she penned about her work, D’Hollander wrote that, “A painting comes into being when ideas and the act of painting coincide. When referring to ideas, it implies that as a painter, I am not facing my canvas as a neutral being but as an acting being who is investing into the act of painting. My being is present in my action on the canvas.”
Born in Belgium in 1968, Ilse D’Hollander graduated from the Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, in 1988, and the Hoger Instituut voor Beelende Kunsten, St. Lucas, Ghent in 1991. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including The Arts Club, London; FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France; and M Museum, Leuven, Belgium. She has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium; the Provinciaal Cultuurcentrum Caermersklooster, Ghent, Belgium; and the Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art, Brussels, Belgium amongst others.