“If you talk to 10 painters, probably 7 of those painters will start talking about Raoul De Keyser,” said Hanna Schouwink, senior partner at David Zwirner Gallery, which represents the late Belgian artist in New York. De Keyser, who passed away in 2012 at the age of 82, left behind a body of work that is deceptively radical and exciting in ways that are difficult to elucidate. As Schouwink alluded to, he cast a long shadow in terms of how he influenced later generations of painters—including Luc Tuymans, who has long been a vocal advocate of De Keyser’s importance. “[De Keyser] is a painter’s painter,” Schouwink added. “That’s become a bit of a cliché, but I do think it really applies to him.”
Artists adore the Belgian’s energetic, enigmatic abstractions, and collectors around the world have followed suit. In tandem with Frieze London, Zwirner dedicated its buzzy online viewing room to De Keyser, subtitling the virtual exhibition “Modern Master.” Trio in Red, a 2006 painting of three uneven shapes floating against a pale ground, had an asking price of $300,000, well ahead of De Keyser’s current auction record. An untitled watercolor on paper from 1999, measuring a mere 9 by 12.25 inches, was on offer for $45,000. The painting Across 2 (Avond) (2000–01) bore an asking price of $280,000. According to the gallery, six of the eight available works have sold.
The popular image of De Keyser is of a man removed from the hustle and bustle of the art world, happily toiling away for decades in his home studio in Deinze, Belgium (a town with a population of around 30,000). His early paintings were brushy, figurative depictions of ordinary things, all close to hand: the corner where the wall meets the floor; a simple doorway or door handle. A representative canvas of this type—a depiction of a hose with sprinkler attachment, completed in 1968—sold for €31,500 ($39,800) in a 2014 sale at Belgian auction house De Vuyst.
Over time, recognizable elements got scrubbed away from De Keyser’s paintings, though they never completely disappeared. Oever (Shore) (1969) looks like a stack of abstract forms, with only its title hinting at the fact that we might be looking at a pared-down depiction of sea, sky, and land. Kalklijn (Chalk Line) (1970) is an austere rendering of a soccer field: flat green turf interrupted by the bright white boundary line, with a shimmer of teal hugging the horizon. That painting set a new auction record for a work by De Keyser when it sold at Christie’s in Amsterdam on Monday, more than tripling its high estimate of €70,000 ($77,000) to sell for €237,500 ($261,000). The result eclipsed De Keyser’s previous auction record of £130,000 ($159,000), set just last month at a Phillips sale in London.