Raoul De Keyser

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Raoul De Keyser (1930–2012) at the gallery’s 519 and 525 West 19th Street locations in New York. Curated by Helen Molesworth, this exhibition will feature major works by the artist with a focus on the mature phase of De Keyser’s career from the 1980s to the 2000s. The exhibition, which marks the first time the gallery has shown such an expansive selection of De Keyser’s oeuvre, follows David Zwirner’s celebrated presentations of the artist’s work in Hong Kong in 2021 and 2022, and, in 2016, Raoul De Keyser: Drift, his last solo exhibition in New York, which was first on view at David Zwirner London in 2015–2016.

Throughout the course of his highly influential career, De Keyser engaged in a singular investigation of the potential expression and pictorial capabilities of abstract painting. Made up of simple shapes and painterly marks, his works allude to the natural world and representational imagery while avoiding suggestions of narrative or reductive frameworks that limit experience and interpretation. De Keyser’s ability to find new and exciting ways to invigorate his surfaces resulted in his reception as a major influence for contemporary painters—“an artist’s artist.” Though De Keyser has been the subject of numerous surveys and solo exhibitions at museums and institutions in Europe since the 1970s, this exhibition will be a rare opportunity for New York audiences to experience the breadth of his practice, his beguiling sense of color, his deft and delicate surfaces, and his sometimes poetic, sometimes mysterious, sometime rigorously formal paintings.