Frieze 91 members are invited to a private viewing of Raoul De Keyser's Touch Game at David Zwirner's West 19th Street locations.
Curated by Helen Molesworth, this exhibition will feature major works by the artist with a focus on the mature phase of De Keyser’s career from the 1980s to the 2000s. The exhibition marks the first time the gallery has shown such an expansive selection of De Keyser’s oeuvre.
Throughout the course of his highly influential career, De Keyser engaged in a singular investigation of the potential expression and pictorial capabilities of abstract painting. Made up of simple shapes and painterly marks, his works allude to the natural world and representational imagery while avoiding suggestions of narrative or reductive frameworks that limit experience and interpretation.
Among the works that will be on view are several paintings from the 1980s, including representative works from De Keyser’s important Zinkend and Hellepoort series, which reflect a notable turn in the artist’s practice toward more dynamic, gestural facture. Among the late period works that will be on view are several paintings from De Keyser’s seminal Come on, play it again series from the early 2000s.
As curator Helen Molesworth notes, “A De Keyser painting deliciously halts the human impulse to make meaning. Instead, his paintings offer us the everyday as the accrual of small forms and gestures designed to heighten and focus our increasingly scattered attention.”
This exhibition will be a rare opportunity for New York audiences to experience the breadth of his practice, his beguiling sense of color, his deft and delicate surfaces, and his sometimes poetic, sometimes mysterious, sometimes rigorously formal paintings.