Ilse D'Hollander – Real Life

Real Life by Ilse D’Hollander
Ilse D’Hollander’s Real Life, a dialogue across generations of painting.

Real Life is presented and curated by Wells Fray-Smith and published in collaboration with Gallery Sofie Van de Velde on the occasion of the group exhibition ‘Real Life’. The publication brings together works by Ilse D’Hollander, Lois Dodd, Christopher Colm Morrin, Jesse Murry, Heidrun Rathgeb, Peter Shear, Trevor Shimizu, and Frank Walter, creating a dialogue across generations and geographies around painting’s enduring engagement with lived experience. The book explores how these artists use painting—through figuration and abstraction—to engage with reality in its most porous and capacious sense, blurring boundaries between pigment and image, poetic and mimetic, illusion and observation, and the tangible and the transcendent. At its core is Ilse D’Hollander’s calm yet profound vision, revealed through her paintings and sketchbooks from 1988 onward, offering intimate reflections on everyday scenes that transform the ordinary into the contemplative. The artworks in this book freely oscillate between representation and abstraction; the literal and the spiritual or transcendental.

Ilse D'Hollander (1968-1997) gave us a rare glimpse into her everyday life. A series of sketchbooks, dated from 1988 onwards, reveal a strong impulse to show the world as it is. In these pages, she directly observed the immediate environment around her, drawing the 'stuff' of her life in pencil, pen and graphite: her cat, a window mullion, the stairs in her house. These drawings were rarely studies for paintings, but were complete exercises in themselves, tools to sharpen her powers of observation and practice using her eye and hand.

Edit & sequence: Sofie Van de Velde, Astrid Vereycken
Design: Bruno Devos
Texts: Wells Fray-Smith, Christopher Colm Morrin, Jesse Murry, Frank Walter

February 2023
ISBN: 9789464002201