Exposition Art Blog: Bram Bogart - Avant-garde visual art

Bram Bogart - Avant-garde visual art

Bram Bogart (July 12, 1921 – May 2, 2012) was a Dutch born Belgian expressionist painter most closely associated with the COBRA group.Abraham van den Boogaart was born in Delft, the Netherlands, the son of Abraham van den Boogaart, a blacksmith. He attended a technical school, and trained for a career as a decorator, while taking a correspondence class in drawingFollowing his education Bogart took a job with an advertising concern in Rotterdam. Subsequent to World War Two the then twenty-five-year-old painter settled in Paris, France where he was among the founders of Art Informel. At first he experimented with cubism and figurative drawing, depicting flowers, still life and self-portraits. In the 1950s he began to concentrate on working with impasto. With thick layers of boldly applied and colourful paint, he developed an expressionist style which became more abstract with time.
In 1961 he and his later to be wife Leni permanently relocated to Belgium and in 1969 he became a Belgian citizen. Here he began to experiment with a more three-dimensional medium, a mix of mortar, siccative, powdered chalk, varnish, and raw pigment, applied to large, heavy wooden backing structures.Wikipedia








 "Bogart got on with Appel and his Cobra associates but fell out with the Dutch cultural establishment over what he perceived as its obsession with Cobra at the expense of any other style. It may not have been coincidence that in 1960 he moved to Belgium, first to Brussels, then for the rest of his life to Ohain, in the province of Walloon Brabant. He took Belgian citizenship in 1969.
During these years, he laid on pigment and cement mixture so thickly that he had to arrange for metal stretchers to bear the weight of his work. Bogart's art entered collections all over Europe and he had shows at galleries including the Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Guggenheim in New York and the Louvre and Pompidou Centre in Paris.No public gallery in Britain picked up on him but there were several exhibitions in London over the years, culminating in two shows at Bernard Jacobson in Mayfair, in 2007 and 2009, showing late paintings of great beauty. The early drawing lessons paid off too. At the end of his life he was said to be still able, like Giotto, to draw a perfect circle, freehand."(theguardian.com)







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