Mi VAN LANDUYT

1939

Mi Van Landuyt (Wetteren, 1939) studied at the Academy of Ghent, the HIGRO in Ghent and the Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Antwerp.

At the Academy of Ghent she met Boudewijn Van Hoecke (Balder) who became her lifelong companion de route. She later settled with Balder in Landegem where together they built up a renowned silkscreen studio.

From 1967 to 1969, she was part of the New Rococo, a Ghent artists’ group in the spirit of the PopArt and Flower Power movement of the time. During this period, she experimented with all possible plastic means (plastic, mirrors, etc.) and used violent, mostly fluorescent colors. We can safely say that Mi Van Landuyt is included in the canon of Belgian Pop Art artists. In fact, a selection of her PopArt work was featured in the exhibition “The 60s & 70s in Belgium” that went on at the Brussels Galerie Laurentin in 2018.

In her later works, Mi van Landuyt walks the indefinable line between abstraction and figuration to end up purely abstract. Her paintings originate from her immediate surroundings. However, the world from which the works emerge or to which they refer is deeply hidden and not at all obtrusively present. After all, it is not important for the viewer to know what the source is, it is up to him to give his own meaning to it.

Formally, her work evokes memories of Jakson Pollock’s action painting techniques. While her way of working is not as wild as Pollock’s and her paintings are also much more elaborate, she still intuitively employs the gestural brushwork of the Abstract Expressionists. Hence probably also her personal affinity with the work of Cy Twombly.

Characteristic of Mi van Landuyt’s work is the constant tension between space and boundary, between object and void. Add to this the selective colors that are often dominantly present, thereby evoking a spatial dialogue.

The essence of her work is perhaps best described by husband and fellow artist Balder: “Important are the power of the gesture, the gesture, always present in this work, the mastery of matter and its transcendence. When I look at her work I never think of canvas, paper or whatever it was made with. The image itself is important and it is fascinating to follow the gesture and read the work. I think this is accomplished work from someone who has looked at, studied and digested art history.”