Kees Visser

Far away from the art schools and movements of which he nevertheless was a keen observer, Kees Visser (b. 1948) has gradually created his own self-taught path over the last forty years. Parting from his native Holland, where in the mid-1970s he had worked in a vein oscillating between abstraction and Fluxus, Kees Visser left to settle in Iceland, where he lived for nearly twenty years. In Iceland, he was not only in contact with a nature that profoundly marks his work, but also an incredibly cosmopolitan art scene where artists such as Dieter Roth, Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Roni Horn, Hrein Fridffinson, Adrian Schiess, Gunther Umberg, Richard Long, etc. often crossed paths.

Co-founder with a group of Icelandic artists of the Living Art Museum in Reykjavik in 1978, Kees Visser became a prominent figure in the Icelandic art world, present in most of the public and private collections in the country. Invited for a residency in Paris in the mid-1990s, it was then in France that Kees Visser developed his work on series, shape and color, creating the monochrome paintings with crystalline qualities for which he is known for today. Beyond these works, which he executes almost exclusively on paper, it is the very space of the presentation itself that Kees Visser progressively integrates into his work as a colorist. He expands the possibilities of the presentation of his paintings by juxtaposition, superimposing them, placing them on the floor, lining them up under glass displays several meters long, reconstituting them as mosaics, etc. It is this concentration on the space in its broadest sense that has led Kees Visser at the same time to create on-site works, taking the form of large murals or monumental installations as he recently did in a chapel in Thouars (2006), at the Eglise Saint Eustache in Paris (2007) and for the Musée Bourdelle (2010).

The Matisse Museum in Le Cateau-Cambrésis gave him a retrospective exhibition in the summer of 2009. In 2012, the National Gallery of Iceland in conjunction with the Living Art Museum of Reykjavik will present two important exhibitions of Kees Visser. His works are in several international private and public collections (Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, National Gallery of Iceland, Living Art Museum in Reykjavik, MOMA in New York, Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou, FRAC Bretagne, FNAC, etc.). The gallery has dedicated two solo shows to his work in 2009 and 2013.