Ad Dekkers (1938-1974)
Ad Dekkers was part of a nineteen sixties movement of artists pursuing the purest form of abstraction. For these artists, their tools were the straight or curved line, the geometric composition, and monochrome colour fields of white, black, red, blue and yellow. Their style can be seen as a radical response to the expressive and personal art of the CoBrA* movement.
Dekkers initially worked as a realist, but began to ask himself what the point of the illusion in the visual arts was, ultimately choosing an aesthetic principle that rejected the very concept. Instead, for Dekkers, art is no more than what you see: a surface, a line, a relief. By the mid-nineteen sixties, he even abandoned colour, concentrating on the absolute, pure form and creating the white reliefs for which he would become best known: repeated circles that advance and retreat, layered forms documenting the transition from circle to square to triangle. In all of them, the effect of light is critical to the work. Apart from an object of pure, visual beauty, Dekkers also saw his works as a confrontation of opposing concepts. For him, the circle was the complete, the feminine, while the square and the triangle symbolised the angular, the male.
* CoBrA was an art movement founded in 1948 by the artists Constant, Corneille, Christian Dotremont and Asger Jorn. Karel Appel was also an artist active in this movement. This 'young guard' found inspiration in untraditional sources like non-Western art and children's drawings.
