Adelheid de Witte

Adelheid De Witte is an autodidact. After wandering around Barcelona and painting behind closed doors for five years, the artist has been showing her masterful paintings and surprising objects for a short while now. In that span of time her works have become more and more abstract. Representation turned out to be too restrictive for De Witte and so figuration disappeared into the background to finally dissolve into cloudy structures and vibrating line figures. 

From her research into light and shadow effects as well as colour creation, abstract landscapes emerged in which occasionally elements appear that vaguely recall objects. Objects that the artist found on the streets of Barcelona back then and which she incorporated into assemblages and installations. Spatial interventions such as a collection of cut umbrellas on the floor already testified to De Witte’s fascination with materials, but also to her urge to break out into space. Today she pushes the boundaries of the two-dimensional surface further and further away with her often larger-format canvases. The landscape fades out and eventually evaporates. It is up to the viewer to project a landscape in the clouds and the incidence of light.

For her paintings the artist does not limit herself to classical canvases. Their shape is unusual: round, polygonal or that of a (round arched) window. In addition to canvas, she also brings materials such as wood, slate, old lace machines and drumheads into the studio. De Witte does not necessarily apply colour with a brush or not even with a binder mixed into paint for that matter. She also rubs pure pigment into canvas, puts it into tubes and lets colour light up in neon sculptures.

Text by Roxane Baeyens