oil on canvas

signed and annotated on the reverse

74 x 94 cm including frame.

Biography of Jaap Gardenier (1930-2009) 

Jaap Gardenier (Delft 1930-2009 Manosque) studied art history at the University of Amsterdam, where he discovered his passion for drawing and painting during a workshop. He was so absorbed in painting that he did not complete his studies and focused entirely on painting.

 In 1961 he was in Lacoste in the south of France, where he became friends with the Swedish painter Sven Blomberg, who in England belonged to the group formed around the painter Victor Pasmore. In 1962 he left the Netherlands permanently to settle in an abandoned farm in the Alps.

 Landscapes, city and harbor scenes are given a great psychic presence in the abstract construction through a series of very rich colors. The emotion that a spectacle evokes is the basis for his paintings, drawings, engravings and lithographs. He creates powerful, intense and enchanting work. His works are figurative and abstract at the same time. Because it often seems abstract but is painted according to reality. In the same way that Nicolas de Staël did it, he only holds the lines of force of these landscapes and machines or the contours of people.

 Jaap Gardenier admired the works of many artists from different times; from Vermeer, Goya, Degas, Van Gogh, Pierre Bonnard, Picasso or Nicolas de Staël and Francis Bacon to David Hockney.

 The career of this self-taught painter is characterized by periods that arise organically from his pictorial explorations. Series are created that try to pin down a subject that he himself mentioned on the site Jaap Gardenier: the paysages de Provence, the distillerie de lavande, l'abattoir de Grosage, la côte de Connemara en Irlande, le port industrial à l'abandon de l'Estaque, l'univers de Harlem et de Brooklyn à New-York & le visage humain comme miroir psychique.