Jan Burssens - without title - Sold

Lithographic portrait of a sample by the Flemish painter and graphic artist Jan Burssens (Mechelen 1925 – Nevele 2002). He is considered one of the leading Flemish existentialist subject painters. He received a limited education of a year at the Academy of Ghent (where he later became a teacher) and remained self-taught for the rest. He left for the Netherlands in 1946, where he came into contact with Karel Appel and Corneille and the poets Bertus Aafjes and Gerrit Achterberg. In the late 1940s, Burssens began experimenting with sand, pebbles and shells in his paint to create certain color effects and textures. The drip technique was also introduced. In 1951 and 1954 he was awarded the Jeune Peinture Belge. In 1952 he founded the group Art Abstrait, but the dogmatic nature of the group's program forced Burssens, who at the same time was still experimenting with 'abstract figuration', to leave "Art Abstrait" after just a year. This meant a liberation for Burssens: he went his own way and this resulted in the most creative and original period in his career. He evolved from lyrical abstraction to figurative expressionism and became 'the painter of the inside' and captured the essence of the sitter. “Driven by the urge for depth, the figurative alibis fade away to become signs and accusations. Human and animal figures speak a pictorial language full of horror, tornness and tenderness, monsters with soft sentences, armored and unapproachable parapets around a vulnerable heart.” His return to figuration and more specifically to portrait painting from 1965 resulted in a series of paintings he made around Che Guevara and Chino. These portraits illustrate Burssens' preference for the art of Goya and Velasquez. He participated in the Venice Biennale (1958) and the Documenta (Kassel, 1959), and his work is present in museums in Brussels, Kortrijk, Ghent and Ostend, but also in the Guggenheim in New York.