Han Schuil: Schilderijen--Paintings 1983-1999

Han Schuil, born in the Netherlands in 1958, is one of the major forces in Dutch painting today. As Dominic van den Boogerd puts it in his introduction to this splendid overview of Schuil's work: "The paintings of Han Schuil reflect something of the urbanized Netherlands of the present, designed down to the last detail. They are crisp, clear images with the immediate impact of a logo. The synthetic colors, the sharp-edged forms and the balanced compositions give the paintings a strong signaling effect, while the irregular contours and surfaces add strength to their physical appearance." Indeed the paintings collected here reveal the engagement of an abstraction-trained artist with the world of comic book icons and advertisement, a world of ubiquitous representation, and the results are both intuitively satisfying and intellectually challenging.