Project Description

Huile sur toile

Signed lower right : S.van Damme

Dimensions : 46 cm x 55 cm

Still Life with turnips and cherry

Suzanne VAN DAMME (Thinking 1901 – Ixelles 1986)

Post-Impressionist painter who evolves into surrealism. She marries the Italian painter Bruno Capacci.

Studies at the Academies of Ghent and Brussels, and the & rsquo; free workshop L & rsquo; Effort in Brussels. Spent his youth in Ostend. Sudden l & rsquo; influence of James Ensor.

James Ensor

Disciple of James Ensor in his early years, she painted the great master in his house in Ostend in 1925 with “The Entry of Christ into Brussels”, – now owned by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In 1938, Ensor painted a canvas titled “Peintres aux Prizes”, with Suzanne Van Damme – pencil in hand – and himself sitting and looking at her. After several exhibitions in Brussels (Coat Gallery 1931 and Galerie Georges Giroux in 1933), Suzanne moved to Paris at the beginning of the 1930. The Paris Gallery (1934) and the Bernheim Gallery (1935) exhibited his work. In “Le Dôme” in Montparnasse, she meets the painter, Italian ceramist and poet Bruno Capacci (Venice 1906), that she marries. The couple befriended French artists like Marcel Duchamp and Jean Cocteau.

Surrealism

Van Damme worked closely with several surrealist poets such as Paul Colinet, Marcel Lecomte, Henry Bauchau e.a. Their poems were regularly dedicated to him, while his compositions transformed into a mixture of literary and pictorial objects. His love for poetry and his experiences in the graphic field were bound to give birth to a new script, a kind of private alphabet full of signs and symbols, a mysterious blend of Japanese calligraphy and Egyptian hieroglyphs in simple black and white. In 1947, the “pope of surrealism” André Breton invites Capacci and Van Damme to participate in the famous “Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme” at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1947, with famous contemporaries such as Arp, Bellmer, Brauner, Calder, Duchamp , Ernst, Giacometti, Gorky, Blue, Matta, Miro, Picabia, Man Ray, Tanguy, Tanning and many more.

Florence

When the couple moved to Florence in the years 1950, Suzanne is very impressed by the beauty of Tuscany, the colors of the earth, sand, the pebbles, marble… She begins to paint or rather “sculpt” abstract wavy shapes on canvas.

United States

In the years 1950 and 1960, Suzanne Van Damme exhibits regularly in the United States: Chicago (Marshall Field Gallery 1959), New York (Thibault Gallery sur Madison Avenue 1961), The Angels, Baltimore, Dallas (Calhoun Gallery 1961), Denver (Saks Gallery 1969) etc.

Emancipation

His last period is certainly the most personal and interesting. A series of small individual abstract and figurative scenes are brought together on canvas or panel, formant un grand patchwork. Most of these cryptograms are painted black, brown and beige, casting a veil of timeless beauty over primitive signals and mythological figures. Others look like stained glass panels in every possible shade of blue, violet, red or orange, shining with an inner light full of mystery. It takes a lot of talent to achieve the ideal harmony, the ultimate balance, the perfect Ying-Yang that every artist dreams of. Suzanne Van Damme definitely had that talent. She died in Brussels in 1986.

Works at the Museums of Brussels, Ghent and Liège.

Another still life by a Belgian painter presented by the Gallery

Source : Group Gallery 2

velo-prices2 400 € *

* excluding postage

  

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