bram bogart, Delft, the netherlands 1921 - Saint-Trond, belgium 2012.

BOGART IS REPRESENTED BY RODOLPHE JANSSEN, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, AND WHITE CUBE, LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM.

Abraham van den Boogaart was born in Delft, the son of a blacksmith. His parents did not welcome their son’s desire to become a painter and sent him to a technical school to become a decorator.

During evenings Bogart was allowed to follow a correspondence course in drawing. During 1937-1939 Bogart worked as a commercial artist for an advertising agency in Rotterdam. During the Second World War, Bogart went into hiding to avoid forced labour for the German army, and managed to paint a series of low-key Dutch landscapes.

After the liberation in 1945, Bogart started to develop his first rough-textured wall-like landscapes, building up his paintings in layers of matter. He associated with the artists of the ‘Art Informel’, a term referring to a loosely knit group practicing different forms of Abstraction.

During the 1950s Bogart settled in Paris for almost a decade and explored the possibilities of monochrome figurative paintings in the manner of Jean Dubuffet. It was his Parisian dealer that suggested the name Bram Bogart. In 1957 Bogart showed for the first time in the UK, as part of an Arts Council touring exhibition, and held his own among a group that included Dubuffet, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Pierre Soulages, and Karel Appel, Bogart's compatriot and a member of the Cobra group (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam). In 1958 Bogart had his first solo show in London, at Gimpel Fils gallery.

During 1958-1960 Bogart spent time in Rome, where he adopted colour. In 1960 Bogart moved to Belgium, first to Brussels, then to Ohain, in the province of Walloon Brabant. He took Belgian citizenship in 1969. During these years, Bogart ‘s paintings became increasingly thickly built up with layers of matter. Bogart had to devise his own metal stretchers to bear the weight of his work. For some artists, the material is an added value, but for Bogart the material is the value itself.

Although Bogart has used the same technique since the early 1960s, he has always been able to renew his painting and is considered one of the most important post-war matter painters.