Philippe Vandenberg

Galerie Christophe Gaillard Paris is pleased to present its first exhibition of work by Philippe Vandenberg (Belgium, 1952–2009), an artist renowned in Belgium and internationally, in partnership with the Estate of Philippe Vandenberg. This is the artist’s first personal exhibition in France since he was shown at Maison Rouge with Berlinde De Bruyckere (Il me faut tout oublier) in Paris in 2014.

In January 2009¹, shortly before his death, Philippe Vandenberg claimed to prefer the title of “witness for the prosecution” to painter or artist; the word “attempts” to “work”.

The remarkable drawing (Untitled, 2007–08) more than four metres in length and most of the work we have chosen to show at the gallery were presented in 2020 at BOZAR (Centre for Fine Arts), Brussels, in the “Molenbeek”, exhibitiondedicated to Philippe Vandenberg’s last work on paper. On large sheets placed on the floor of his huge workshop in the working class neighbourhood of Brussels, Vandenberg drew and interwove bright and colourful words. Repeated like slogans or mantras, these fun, childlike and farcical phrases gradually reveal the violence of the world around him as well as the artist’s private, existential worry – and the urgent need to say them”.

“Firstly, not being an artist but a witness for the prosecution.

Secondly, being mobile.” 

Philippe Vandenberg was born in 1952² in a bourgeois family near Ghent. He drew every day from a very young age. In his teens, he discovered the work of Hieronymus Bosch (Christ Carrying the Cross, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent). He studied literature and art history before taking classes at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Ghent, against the wishes of his parents. He took a keen interest in the work of Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso and Joseph Beuys as well as the writing of Hugo Claus, Louis Ferdinand Céline and Allen Ginsberg. On his travels, Vandenberg discovered American abstract painting in New York (followed by Philip Guston’s work) and Goya and Greco in Madrid.

In the 1980s, Philippe Vandenberg achieved huge success with his figurative work (Kruisigingen [Crucifixions] series, Schervenwerken [Splinter Paintings], and the cycle De Geboorte [Birth]. He was one of the most admired Belgian artists in the contemporary painting revival movement on the international scene . However, in 1989 he began to feel oppressed by the market and the art world. His style shifted and his approach became more radical: the artist took dramatic U-turn and adopted an openly critical stance. His work was loaded with political references as well as farcical symbols. Critics and collectors began to turn away.

The early 1990s marked a new phase in the work of Philippe Vandenberg who began to draw on motifs from Christian iconography. Around this time, he delved into poetry and incorporated words into his drawings. In 1995, Vandenberg reunited with the public. This new chapter was marked by two radical acts: he covered his former work with layers of black paint (Big Blacks) and created drawings with his own blood “to forget painting”. Then “when this too became a habit, when [he] had stopped moving forward”, he returned to his first medium. These new pieces revealed more fragility, softness and tenderness.

In 1996–97, he combined paintings of words with panels filled with fairytale characters and figures from the Old Testament. He travelled in Asia, Cuba and Europe and studied the writing of Elfriede Jelinek, Georg Trakl and Paul Celan. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (MUHKA) organised a major survey exhibition of his work.

In 2001, his depression and drug addiction led to the first of many hospital stays. He completed a series of self portraits alongside portraits of Ukrike Meinhof, a leader of the Red Army Faction, and Antonin Artaud. His painting became more geometric with a focus on symbols, particularly the swastika. In 2005, he left his Ghent workshop and set up in Molenbeek. Vandenberg felt a sense of unprecedented artistic freedom and worked from scrap materials he collected in the street. In the studio, photographs cut from newspapers and images of war disasters sat side by side with words by Genet, Artaud, Céline and Dostoevsky, and the biography of the filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Both figurative and abstract, his work, paintings, collations and drawings convey the cruelty and tragic reality of our condition. Philippe Vandenberg took his own life in 2009. “Witness for the prosecution” of his time, his work continues to exert a strong pull on ours.

“I' was a painter as I was a child, for a long time.

For lack of a mother tongue, I took up painting to formulate life’s questions and demands.

But once the questions were asked, once the demands were expressed, where to find the answers?

And I became a painter of bottlenecks. A painter of exile. A painter of great crucifixions of bottlenecks within the canvas, lacerating the skin of the beautiful painting. Am I still innocent? ³

Philippe Vandenberg's work has been showcased in numerous group exhibitions both domestically and internationally. Several solo exhibitions, including those at venues such as Bozar (BE), De Pont (NL), Kunsthalle Hamburg (DE), La Maison Rouge (FR), and SMAK (BE), provided deeper insights into his work. His work is also featured in private and public collections including the Guggenheim (US), MUHKA (BE), Fondation Antoine de Galbert, (FR), SMAK (BE), The Palestinian Museum, Birzeit (PS), Madison Museum of Fine Arts, Madison (US), or Kunsthaus centre d'art Pasquart, Biel-Bienne (CH).