Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - Figure torsionnée – 1976

Payment required before the evening of October 26. No shipments possible from October 27 for nearly 3 weeks (absence).

Robert Detheux (1932-2010) – Twisted figure – 1976

Artist: Robert Detheux (Brussels, 1932 – Tournai, 2010)


Title of the work: Twisted figure

Date: 1976

Signature: Signed and dated “Detheux 76” in the top left

Technique: Mixed media on cardboard. Dense layers, scratches, hatching, highlights and reserves, surface highly worked and almost relief-like.

Dimensions: 51.7 × 42 cm

Condition: Very good overall. The material is held and coherent; the surface effects and scratches are entirely intentional by the artist and fully contribute to the work. Sold unframed.

Provenance: Artist’s studio fonds (acquired directly).

Description:

Large drawing on cardboard dated 1976, a moment when Detheux pushes material and the figure to a particularly high degree of density. No title accompanies this work, but the composition reads as a twisting figure.

An organic, almost sculptural mass occupies the center and the upper part of the sheet. One can distinguish a torso, volumes that twist, folds and bulges. The form seems at once human and mineral, in motion and frozen.

Geometric lines (a triangle, a rectangle) cross the mass and structure it without explaining it. They act as landmarks or tensions inside the body.

The surface is exceptionally dense: gray, black, white, brown and red touches, tight scratches, almost-relief zones. The tactile effect is almost geological. The figure does not stand out from the background; it emerges from it and returns to it. Detheux here does not seek legibility, but a physical presence of the body, a twist that resists the gaze.

We are fully in the Belgian surrealism of the 1970s as Detheux practiced it: an hybrid figure, active material, ambiguity between body and surface. The large format and the intensity of the work make it a particularly strong piece from this period.

Rare 1976 drawing, large format, signed and dated, with exceptionally worked material. A major work for enthusiasts of Detheux and Belgian surrealism who appreciate twisted figures and dense surfaces.

Artist’s biography:

Born in Brussels in 1932 and passed away in Tournai in 2010, Robert Detheux is a singular figure in 20th-century Belgian art. A graduate of the Saint-Luc Institute in Brussels' Fine Arts, he taught graphic expression at the Tournai Academy until 1996, while pursuing a personal body of work of great coherence.

From the 1950s, he developed a very personal surrealist and graphic language. He received the Prize for Young Belgian Painting in 1953, 1954 and 1971. The 1970s deepen the themes of the body and female face, hybrid figures and textures.

The following decades extend this territory toward the grotesque, eroticism and black humor, before the spectral portraits and appearances of the 2000s.

Little exposed during his lifetime, Detheux worked freely. The discovery of his studio fonds (nearly 1,500 works) revealed this coherence.

His drawing, demanding and immediately recognizable, now attracts collectors of Belgian surrealism, in Belgium, Spain and Europe.