Wim Oepts, Landscape (Provence), 1979, oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm, private collection
Wim Oepts and the Painters of the Sunny South offers a comprehensive overview of the work of artist Wim Oepts (1904-1988) and his Dutch contemporaries. Oepts is a popular painter, known for his abstract, colorful landscapes. He found inspiration for his distinctive paintings full of contrasting colors in the sun-drenched south of France.
Chasing the sun
"I am truly inspired by the south," said painter Wim Oepts (1904-1988). In 1937, the artist—born and raised in Amsterdam—discovered the magical Mediterranean light that makes the world sparkle and glow with color in the picturesque fishing village of Collioure in southern France. From that moment on, he definitively left behind the businesslike and somber neo-realism that his discoverer and mentor Charley Toorop (1891-1955) had taught him, just as he was about to break through in the Netherlands.
Oepts settled in Paris in 1939. He felt 'liberated' in the city of light and continued to live there until his death. Influenced by pure colorists such as Pierre Bonnard, André Derain, and his French teacher Othon Friesz, his art developed into an ode to color in France. In the summer, he followed the sun, especially to Saint-Tropez. In the winter, he worked on his sketches at home and turned them into paintings. Landscapes, including village and harbor views, became his exclusive subject from the late 1940s onwards. Characteristic are the large areas of color and the bright, often unrealistic colors. Blue trees and green skies regularly appear in Oepts' work.
Wim Oepts (1904-1988), Bridge, 1984, oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm, private collection
Wim Oepts and his Dutch contemporaries
The exhibition Wim Oepts and the Painters of the Sunny South at Museum JAN offers a comprehensive overview of Oepts' oeuvre. The exhibition focuses on his French period, during which the painter attracted a loyal group of collectors. The exhibition also includes a selection of works by other Dutch painters. These contemporaries of Oepts were also inspired, for varying lengths of time, by the Mediterranean light. Wim Oepts may be known as the painter of the sunny South, but he was certainly not the only one.
Paintings by artists such as Dirk Filarski (1885-1964), Matthieu Wiegman (1886-1971), Charles Eyck (1897-1983), Fred Sieger (1902-1999), and Otto B. de Kat (1907-1995), as well as from a later generation of artists, including Nicolaas Wijnberg (1918-2006) and Jef Diederen (1920-2009), place Oepts' work in a broader perspective while at the same time underlining his individual, unique representation of the sun-drenched French landscape.
Guest curator: Feico Hoekstra
The catalog Wim Oepts and the Painters of the Sunny South, which accompanies this exhibition, is published by Waanders. €23.95
24 x 29 cm, 80 pages, paperback, ISBN 978 94 6262 438 2