Jeroen Krabbé - The Late Light

Museum de Fundatie will show recent paintings by Jeroen Krabbé from 24 May. The exhibition titled Het late licht consists of more than 30 landscapes and abstract light impressions.

Jeroen Krabbé was born into an artistic family. Inspired by his grandfather Heinrich Martin Krabbé and his father Maarten Krabbé, he started drawing and painting from a very young age and it seemed inevitable he would follow in their footsteps. Nonetheless, Jeroen decided to become an actor. Immediately following his international breakthrough with the movie  Soldier of Orange in 1977 however, he enrolled at the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten (National Academy for the Arts) in Amsterdam. "It just kept nagging at the back of my mind, I was predestined to be a painter". Jeroen Krabbé was Friso ten Holt’s student at the Academy. The Ten Holt retrospective exhibition  Licht en lijnen  will open simultaneously with the exhibition on Krabbé, Het late licht  .

Krabbé's style developed from hyper-realistic miniature works inspired by Melle, by way of portraits, Pop Art and fierce expressionism to colourful landscapes in which we can feel the influence of Bonnard and Matisse. The principal motif in these landscapes are the woods and fields around Dalfsen and the Frisian countryside. The exotic countries he visits for his work as an actor also regularly feature in his work.

Krabbé fashions himself as the painter of happiness; a painter of paradises. Museum de Fundatie mounted a retrospective of his work in 2008.

A real pivotal point in his work was the De ondergang van Abraham Reiss series from 2010. In these nine very large paintings, Jeroen Krabbé sets out the life story of his grandfather, who was killed in Sobibor. With this grand scale document of the Holocaust, the painter seemed to have moved on from his penchant for landscapes. This impression was reinforced by the following exhibition of his work in De Fundatie: Dum Vivimus Vivamus, in which Krabbé chose as a subject his own youth and the drawings he made as a child.

Het late licht sees the painter returning to the landscape genre. The landscape surrounding his house in Dalfsen provides the subject matter. But there has been a noticeable structural change to his approach. Gone are the idyllic paradises of previous years, replaced by intense manifestations of light and colour. Sun beams as lightning rods and earth as glowing lava on a series of small canvasses culminate in 12 large abstract works in which Krabbé jettisons everything figurative and paints only form and colour.  Het late licht  is about the magic of paint, the persuasiveness of beauty and the infinity of art.  

To mark the exhibition, an eponymous book will be published by Waanders & de Kunst, including a discussion between Jeroen Krabbé and Ralph Keuning as chronicled by Frénk van der Linden and Pieter Webeling.

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