Playful and fresh

(© Ann Veronica Janssens )

Under the heading “Sense of Colors”, the Keitelman Gallery presents a group of artists of different generations whose work focuses on colour. Including, for example, a watercolour composition on paper from the 1930s by the modernist artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Taeuber-Arp, a dancer in her youth, creates a feeling of rhythm via an arrangement of circles in various colours. The exhibition includes a number of understated works by Josef Albers, known for his studies of colour. In a show with such a theme, Yves Klein could hardly be omitted: Klein created his own colour, known as International Klein Blue (IKB), on which he took out a patent. The material nature of paint itself is a theme for some of the artists involved, as in a painting by Bram Bogart, who died recently, which is made up of an accumulation of thick layers of paint that seem to defy gravity. Jonathan Monk, for his part, exhibits a number of coloured steel plates that he has attached to each other to create a piece of furniture, while Imi Knoebel incorporates an aluminium plate in his pitch-black canvass, deliberately blurring the boundary between painting and sculpture. Michel Mouffe also works with volume, placing an object behind his painting, so that the canvass is no longer flat and taut, but shows a faint bulge. There is a subtle piece of sculpture by Ann Veronica Janssens, a Belgian artist who can evoke ephemeral experiences of fog, among other things. Here she shows a translucent Vaseline-like abstract sculpture with a greenish-yellow glow. Although all the artists included employ an abstract formal idiom, there is plenty of variation in this exhibition, which presents a successful and colourful dialogue between different generations. The result is surprisingly playful and fresh.

Sense of Colors > 27/10, di/ma/Tu > za/sa/Sa 12 > 18.00, gratis/gratuit/free, Keitelman Gallery, rue Van Eyckstraat 44, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-511.35.80, www.keitelmangallery.com