Anton Heyboer (1924-2005) - Vier Bruiden

Groot, an expressive work on paper by Anton Heyboer (1924–2005), built around four side-by-side female figures. The bodies are frontal and rendered with strong simplification, featuring broad hips, pronounced breasts, and heads almost entirely filled in with dark. The figures stand close together and fill nearly the entire picture plane, creating a compact, rhythmic composition.

Heyboer works with a very limited but powerful palette of red and black against the unprimed, light paper. Broad brushstrokes, dry applications, and more transparent passages alternate. Black areas occasionally run into drips and splashes, while the red loosens the contours and anatomical forms in a free, sketchy manner. The paper remains visible in several places and thus actively serves as a third color. At the bottom, a jagged red brushline visually links the four figures. The spontaneous brushwork, elemental human figures, and the deliberately visible act of painting are characteristic of Heyboer’s free later painting practice.
Dimensions approximately 79 × 108 cm.

Artist biography
Anton Heyboer (Sabang, Dutch East Indies, 1924 – Den Ilp, 2005) was a Dutch painter, draftsman and printmaker. Through his father’s work he spent parts of his youth in the Netherlands, Curaçao and New York, and he was initially trained as a mechanical engineer. During World War II he was sent to Germany as part of the Arbeitseinsatz and stayed in a work camp in Berlin.

From the 1950s onward, Heyboer developed a completely own pictorial language of human figures, signs, and symbolic schemes. In the 1960s and 1970s he gained international recognition: his work was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and he exhibited at the Documenta in Kassel in 1959, 1964 and 1969. Kunstmuseum Den Haag organized his first large museum survey of graphic work in 1967; in 1975 followed a major exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Later, Heyboer largely withdrew from the regular art circuit and worked from his estate in Den Ilp, where he lived with five women. This unconventional communal living arrangement was strongly linked to his public image. His later work often arose quickly and directly, with a free brushwork and recurring human figures.