Description

'REAL LIFE' – ILSE D'HOLLANDER

Real Life: a dialogue across generations of painting.

'Real Life' is presented and curated by Wells Fray-Smith and published in collaboration with Gallery Sofie Van de Velde on the occasion of the group exhibition Real Life. The publication brings together works by Ilse D’Hollander, Lois Dodd, Christopher Colm Morrin, Jesse Murry, Heidrun Rathgeb, Peter Shear, Trevor Shimizu, and Frank Walter, creating a dialogue across generations and geographies around painting’s enduring engagement with lived experience. The book explores how these artists use painting — through figuration and abstraction — to approach reality in a porous and poetic sense, blurring boundaries between pigment and image, illusion and observation, and the tangible and the transcendent. At its core is Ilse D’Hollander’s calm yet profound vision, revealed through her paintings and sketchbooks from 1988 onward, offering intimate reflections on everyday scenes that transform the ordinary into the contemplative.