This #StaffPicksSaturday features Ilse D'Hollander. Each Saturday a member of the #SeanKellyNY team will highlight a work from one of our artists that touched, surprised, or inspired them.
Adair Lentini, Head of Media and Communications, has selected a painting by Ilse D'Hollander, who created an extraordinary and highly resonant body of work, during her unfortunately brief career, that demonstrates a profoundly developed sense of color, composition, scale, and surface. "I love the delicate abstract paintings Ilse created. They always fill me with a sense of nostalgia and calmness, which during this time is particularly comforting. I find that each time I revisit one of her paintings I notice new details in her brushwork."
Through her use of subtle tones and pared-down compositions, Ilse D'Hollander highlights the rich dialogue between representation and abstraction. She drew inspiration from her surroundings in both Sin-Niklaas, Belgium, where she was born, and the small town of Paulatem, in the Flemish countryside, where she spent the last, highly productive years of her life. Her paintings allude to the material world, suggesting objects, interiors, rural vistas and vast horizons; nonetheless, these images remain resolutely abstract. Focused on the ways in which color and form are perceived, D’Hollander’s work reveals a masterful command of graphic composition and painterly touch.
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.”