Ilse D’Hollander

In her short life, Ilse D’Hollander (1968–1997) created an intelligent, sensual and highly resonant body of work. Born in Sint-Niklaas, Belgium, in 1968, graduating from the Hoger Instituut voor Beeldende Kunsten, St Lucas, Gent, in 1991, D’Hollander was steadfastly committed to painting as an intellectual and emotional endeavour. Her often small-scale canvases and works on paper are charged with references to the everyday. Yet, enlivened by an expressive, though always economical, touch, her work resonates just as strongly as a sustained, self-reflexive enquiry into the act of painting: what it might take to bring an image into being on a bounded, flat plane.

D’Hollander drew upon her impressions and experience of place, particularly the Flemish countryside where she spent the last, highly productive years of her life. However, while alluding to objects and places in the world, as well as specifics of temperature and light, D’Hollander’s paintings are seldom immediately recognisable as straightforward landscapes. Instead, drawing the viewer in, her work reveals a masterful command of graphic and painterly touch that captures, holds and, often, diverts attention. Monochrome or near monochrome fields might be interrupted by blocks of colour; geometric volumes softened by streaks or strokes of paint – applied with a brush or sometimes the artist’s hands. The results can be read as a series of accumulated impressions, adjustments and layerings within her judiciously pared-back compositions – a visual record of the artist’s thought processes. 

In 1991, in the only published text she wrote about her work, D’Hollander explained her process: ‘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.’