Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - L’apparition aux quatre seins – 2009

Robert Detheux (1932-2010) The apparition with four breasts – 2009 Artist: Robert Detheux (Brussels, 1932 – Tournai, 2010) Title of the work: The apparition with four breasts Date: 2009 Signature: Signed and dated “Detheux 2009” at the bottom left. Technique: Mixed media on paper. Pencil, gray wash, white highlights and traces of blue. The figure is built with light lines and stippling; the background is worked with blotches and scratching. An airy, spectral material. Dimensions: 59 × 41.5 cm Condition: Very good overall condition. The material is held, the drawing readable, the white highlights clear. Atelier paper shows the handling, a few traces of handling at the margins, with no impact on the figure. Sold unframed. Provenance: Artist’s workshop collection (acquired directly). Description: Work from 2009. Detheux was seventy-seven years old. It is one of his last major figures. The drawing belongs fully to the final period: spectral portraits, apparitions, creatures. A nude woman, facing forward, stands in an undefined space. The body is long, fluid, almost transparent. She has four breasts, clearly drawn, two high and two lower. This is not an anomaly: it is the heart of the subject. The belly and hips descend in slow curves. The face bears two large round, fixed, almost lunar eyes, looking straight ahead. The features are barely suggested. The figure is not real. She appears. In her hands, at the bottom right, she holds a small rolled form, a creature or spectral child, circled by a blue line. The four-breasted woman holds another presence. The gesture is slow, almost ritual. Nothing is narrative. Everything is multiplication and haunting. The background, gray and stippled, describes no place. It isolates the figure and reinforces its status of presence-absence. We are in the Belgian surrealism of Detheux’s very latest period: the body has become multiple and spectral, the woman has become an apparition, the gesture has become an enigma. Signed, dated, large format and with a rare material in the collection: a major piece from the 2009 years, for lovers of drawing and Belgian mixed media who are sensitive to hybrid figures, multiplied bodies and apparitions. Artist’s Biography: Born in Brussels in 1932 and died in Tournai in 2010, Robert Detheux is a singular figure in Belgian art of the 20th century. A graduate of the Saint-Luc Institute in Fine Arts in Brussels, he taught graphic expression at the Tournai Academy until 1996, while pursuing a personal body of work with great coherence. From the 1950s, he established himself with a very personal surrealist and graphic language. He received the Belgian Young Painting Prize in 1953, 1954 and 1971. The following decades deepen the same territory. 1970s: body and female face, hybrid figures, textures. 1980s-1990s: grotesque, erotism, black humor. 2000-2010: spectral portraits, apparitions, creatures. The present work fully belongs to this last moment. Little-exhibited during his lifetime, Detheux worked freely. The unveiling of his workshop archive (nearly 1,500 works) made this coherence visible. His drawing, demanding and immediately recognizable, now attracts collectors of Belgian surrealism in Belgium, Spain and Europe.

Estimate:£168.96

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