Gilbert Swimberghe

The Bruges-based visual artist Gilbert Swimberghe (Bruges 1927 - Brussels 2015) is one of the key figures in the post-war avant-garde abstract art movement in Belgium.

Swimberghe began his career in the 1950s with works in an expressionist style similar to that of Permeke. After meeting Luc Peire and Victor Servranckx, he moved away from the figurative Bruges School and embarked on a decades-long search for abstraction and purification.

Within Gilbert Swimberghe’s abstract oeuvre, different periods can be identified based on primary colors. These include a pink period (1970-1971), a yellow period (1972-1973), a yellow-green period (1974-1975), a gray-white period (1975-1990), and a blue period (1990-2015).

Notable exhibitions in Gilbert Swimberghe’s career include a retrospective at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges in 1977 and another retrospective in 1984 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.

Works by Gilbert Swimberghe can be found in the collections of numerous museums both in Belgium and abroad (USA, Germany, Italy, Brazil, etc.).

Yellow-Green Period (1974-1975)

The grand and monumental works from the yellow-green period are usually divided along the central axis, with the same composition mirrored on both halves of the painting.

The almost architectural symmetrical composition, the monumentality of the shapes, and the varying play of depth suggestion are illuminated and poetically enhanced by the refinement of the colors. The subtlety of the gently harmonized yellows, greens, olives, and oranges creates this effect.

Also characteristic of this period is the application of paint. The oil paint is applied evenly in flat layers, so that any sensual or tactile impression is avoided in favor of pure formal and visually spatial suggestions.

From the 1990s: Blue, the Triangle, and the Monochrome

In this minimalist period, from 1990 until his death in 2015, Swimberghe created a vast array of images using three simple elements: blue, the triangle, and the monochrome.

In an almost obsessive and compulsive manner, Swimberghe explored all shades of blue: the blue of morning, evening, and night; the blue of the sky, azure, the sea, sapphire, opal, ultramarine, cobalt, indigo, violet… He achieved these color nuances by layering many coats of blue on top of one another.

The varying shades of blue lend the surface a great sense of space, creating an illusory depth from which the triangle, through self-realization, attempts to emerge.

The greater pictorial quality of the blue is further emphasized by the subtle yet visible brushstroke, moving from right to left downward. For Swimberghe, this painterly gesture was inherently linked to meditation.

With its imperfect, jagged edges, the thick paper on which many of these works were created contributes to the meditative nature of the blue period.

White Reliefs

During the period from 1969 to 1974, Gilbert Swimberghe created a number of white reliefs that would become highlights in his career.

These reliefs should be situated within the international context of contemporary production of minimal, monochrome white reliefs, where the names of artists such as Piero Manzoni, Jan Schoonhoven, Ad Dekkers, and Walter Leblanc come to mind. Due to these reliefs, Gilbert Swimberghe referred to himself not as a painter, but as a visual artist.