Jan Roeland, Last Works

Slewe Gallery is proud to announce the upcoming exhibition with the last paintings by Jan Roeland, who recently passed away. His last works include paintings with a single flower or branches as motif but also some birds and a frog, his last motif. The show will open Saturday March 11 and will last until April 15. A week later an overview of his work will open in the Kunsthal Rotterdam on Saturday March 18. This exhibition will be an hommage and will show the astonishing consistent and varied artistic development of a Dutch master painter. Along with the exhibition a catalogue will be published by Waanders with illustrations of all shown works at the Kunsthal and texts by some artists and critics' friends of Roeland. 

Jan Roeland has built up an oeuvre of paintings which moves between geometric abstraction and figuration. Recognisable simple motifs of everyday objects, such as hammers, toy-aeroplanes, plants and ducks give his formally built up abstract painting some sense of humor. His paintings are precisely constructed and built up with several layers of oil paint, in which color plays an important role. The relatively small formats of his canvases fit in the old Dutch tradition of Easel-painting.

Roeland was born in 1935. After his study he started exhibiting in 1965 and since 1969 regularly at Galerie Espace. In 2001 he started showing at Slewe Gallery. He lived and worked in Amsterdam during his whole life and passed away at the age of 81 in 2016. His work has been collected by several museums, such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and Schunck in Heerlen. In 1997 a comprehensive catalog had been published, overviewing more than 25 years of his work, with texts by Elly Stegeman, K. Schippers and Anna Tilroe, along a travelling exhibition of his work at the Beyerd in Breda, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede. In 2007 another catalog has been published along a solo show at the Stadsgalerij Heerlen, with texts by Tijs Goldschmidt and Jan Andriesse. In 2010 he had an exhibition at the Hedge House in Wijlre, near Maastricht.