For three weeks, Galerie Jos Depypere has the honor of presenting a retrospective exhibition dedicated to Yvan Theys, on view from March 7 until March 29 2026.
The exhibition brings together a selection of masterpieces created between 1970 and 1995, offering visitors a unique opportunity to rediscover the powerful and distinctive oeuvre of one of the key figures of postwar Belgian art.
Yvan Theys (Marke, 1936 – 2005) was a leading Belgian artist who, over the course of more than forty years, developed a powerful, idiosyncratic, and coherent body of work situated at the intersection of figuration and abstraction. As a painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and later also a sculptor, he is considered one of the most important figures in postwar Belgian art. His work reflects a continuous search for a visual language in which physicality, thought, and emotion question and reinforce one another.
Theys studied at Sint-Lucas in Tournai, where he himself began teaching as early as 1959. He was a student of Eugène Dodeigne and maintained close friendships with artists such as Eugène Leroy.
In the 1960s he developed into an artist who consciously distanced himself from both purely academic figuration and strict abstraction. Although he was associated with the movement of New Figuration, he gave it a distinctly personal and existential interpretation.
A central premise in his work was the observation that human beings never perceive a figure or reality in its entirety. He translated this experience of partial perception into visual form by fragmenting the body, for example in depictions of seated figures.
From this insight emerged a visual language in which monumental figures, archetypal forms, and geometric signs coexist with an expressive, sometimes rough formal vocabulary. His work is permeated with symbolism and carries a palpable human and psychological tension.
Theys deliberately refused to exploit a single fixed style. His artistic practice was rather a continuous dialogue with art history and with painting itself.
He drew inspiration from diverse sources from the Flemish Primitives and Rubens to Expressionism, Cobra, and especially Picassowithout ever becoming derivative.
In 1963, Yvan Theys participated in a joint exhibition with Roger Raveel and Raoul De Keyser Wyckaert. A year later he was awarded the Prix de Rome, a key moment that marked his national and international breakthrough. From 1964 onward he followed an intensive exhibition trajectory, with presentations in Spain, Munich, and Amsterdam, among other places.
His international reputation was further deepened through numerous exhibitions in South America, where encounters with other cultures and visual traditions steered his oeuvre in a new direction. In 1983 he was selected for the São Paulo Biennial, followed by a solo exhibition, and in 1986 he took part in the biennials of Tokyo and Kyoto. Later he also exhibited in the United States.
From the early 1980s onward, Theys expanded his artistic practice to include sculpture. In 1980 he created his first sculptures, followed from 1993 by wooden figures and further experiments with various media.
During the 1990s his work evolved increasingly toward abstraction, with a more pronounced use of white. Despite this shift, the human presence remained central, as did the existential themes that continue to permeate his oeuvre.Until his death in 2005, Yvan Theys consistently continued to develop a committed and coherent body of work that raises fundamental questions about the image of humanity, identity, power, and vulnerability.
