Bram BOGART - Happy Birthday!

Press release

Born on July 12, 1921 in Delft, Netherlands, Bram Bogart celebrates his 90th birthday during two solo exhibitions, one at Galerie Jean-Luc+Takako Richard in Paris and another at Bernard Jacobson Gallery in London.

A retrospective exhibition from the 1950’s to today

The fifteen exhibited works retrace the past 70 years throughout the career of this self-taught, untiring worker since he began in Paris in the 1950’s living on rue de Turenne, the very same street of his Parisian gallery today. His work was not displayed in Paris until 2000.

Galerie Jean-Luc+Takako Richard is organizing a retrospective exhibition with works from each decade, ranging from small paintings to others weighing hundreds of kilos.

The exhibition will include several rare works of the 50’s: stretched canvas thickly painted with dark colors, with a non-expressionist gesturing aesthetics in that its purpose was not to express bodily or spiritual movement, but that of viewing the pictorial mass in and ofitself.

In Bram Bogart’s work during the 1960’s, the painting as the object and the painting as a representation is one in the same. The paint becomes liberated from requiring stretched canvas. The color is the material and therefore, the volume. Starting in the 1970’s, his visual language was formed and then he has been able to explore all its possibilities until today.

Sculptural possibilities of color-material deposited in balls, hollowed, twisted, or brushed in large strokes linearly and circularly, paintflattened by a flat surface fitting into the paint and pushing at the edges, thereby forming a natural frame when the panel is removed. One can equally discover the extreme richness of his color palette, ranging from vivid, happy colors to the softest pastel tints, little-known in France, and appreciate the precision of his color combinations, varying from his all-over arrangements of a wide variety of colors to hismonochromes, which are still very different from each other.

Bram Bogart, new artist of the gallery

Known for displaying emerging painters, notably Americans involved in digital painting, the gallery has enriched its programming in previous years by hosting established artists. It promotes painters who have physically expanded painting into three-dimensions during the 20^th century: Bram Bogart in Europe and Ron Gorchov in the U.S., as well as those who have removed painting from all support systems, like Linda Besemer and Laurence Papouin.

Jean-Luc Richard noticed the return of material in painting in young artists from New York and California, whether abstract or figurative; so today he considers Bram Bogart more contemporary  than ever. The excess of material in Bram Bogart’s work corresponds as well to the Baroque taste of the gallerist. He considers Bram Bogart to be the only living contemporary painter able to meet the challenge of being exhibited in Versailles.