Kees Visser
Kees Visser belongs to the generation of artists who, in the way of John Armleder, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Allan Charlton, Adrien Schiess or Peter Halley in the 1980s, have had to grapple with the post-modernist heritage wherein the work of art, after being deconstructed and analysed in all its diverse forms, had to be reconstituted as a means of expression.
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Far from the artistic schools and movements that he has at any rate followed extensively, Kees Visser has gradually over the last forty years forged his path in a moreover autonomous manner. After having left his native Holland in the 1970s, where he had worked in the vein of the avant garde shifting between abstraction and Fluxus, he migrated to Iceland, where he has lived for almost twenty years in contact with an idea of nature that has profoundly marked his work. He has also been influenced by the incredibly cosmopolitan art scene in Reykjavik where such artists have crossed paths as Dieter Roth, Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Roni Horn, Hrein Fridffinson, Adian Schiess, Gunther Umberg, Richard Long, etc.
Co-founder with a group of Icelandic artists of the Living Art Museum in Reykjavik in 1978, Kees Visser has become a major figure of the Icelandic art scene, his works included in most public and private collections of the country. Invited for a residency in Paris in the mid 1990s, it was in France that Kees Visser developed his idea of the series, the form, and color far enough to lead to the innovation of the monochromatic paintings that he is so known for today. Although they are created almost exclusively on paper, we find that the space in which they are exhibited has been progressively integrated into the reflection of the artist as a colourist. Expanding the possibilities of presentation and juxtaposition of his paintings, they are placed on the ceiling, on the wall or the floor, aligned on windows that span dozens of meters, or composed into mosaics. It is this same intuition for space that has led him to create public works in situ that take the form of large painted murals or monumental installations, as in his interventions in a chapel in Thouars (2006) or at the Saint Eustache Church in Paris (2007).
Today, Kees Visser lives and works between Haarlem, Paris, and Rejkjavik. The Musee Matisse of Cateau-Cambresis dedicated a retrospective exposition to him in the summer of 2009. He will also be the guest of honour at the National Gallery of Iceland in 2011 during the Reykjavik Arts Festival. His works are today conserved in multiple public and private collections on an international scale (the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the National Gallery of Iceland, the Living Art Museum of Reykjavik, MOMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Kandinsky Library of the Centre Pompidou, FRAC Bretagne, etc).
His work has been shown in four exhibitions at Galerie Poggi in 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2022 on the occasion of the publication of his latest monograph, conceived and designed by the designer Irma Boom and distributed by NAi Publisher.
Works
News & Press
Exhibitions at the Gallery
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The First Stone
October 13 - December 2, 2023
Ecce Homo
02 Jul. – 13 Aug. 2022
Kees Visser, Monochromes ?
28 Apr. - 18 Jun. 2022
Rainbow Gravity
June 20 – July 18, 2020
