Yves Zurstrassen

The Galerie Xippas in Geneva is delighted to present an exhibition by Yves Zurstrassen. For the first time, the Belgian artist invests the swiss space with a personal exhibition and presents a series of recent paintings.

Yves Zurstrassen’s work is always moving, going from lyrical abstraction to abstract expressionism and vice versa. The Belgian artist develops a singular creating process and uses a very particular technique that reflects the desire to go beyond temporality. His approach plays with the principle of collage and take-off of various forms of paper on successive layers of color. So the layers of pigments add up and subtract, letting emerge by fragments the skin of the canvas or the archeology of its construction. Far away for any formalism, the artist works the gesture in a wild succession of applications and withdrawals. Yves Zurstrassen confronts his spontaneous, sometimes violent, body movements with the delicacy of the floral, stellar and wave-like motives he uses. He creates wefts and networks, bringing to light the rhythm. The gesture is lyrical and makes prevail the musicality.

Yves Zurstrassen was born in Belgium 1956. He works and lives between Brussels and Viens (FR). As an important figure in the landscape of contemporary art, several institutions have organized solo exhibitions of his work: the Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art contemporain in Liège (2006), Le Salon d'Art in Brussels (2014, 2011), the IKOB - Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Eupen (2009), l'Aboa Vetus & Art Nova Museum in Finland (2008) or l'Institut Supérieur pour l'Etude du Langage Plastique in Brussels (2000). Yves Zurstrassen's work has been exposed in numerous group show such as Hartung et les peintres lyriques (Fonds pour la culture Hélène & Edouard Leclerc, France, 2017), at the Latvian National Museum of Art in RIga (2010), at the Museum of Young Art in Wien (2008) or at the National Museum of Bucarest (2002). His work is also shown in various galleries through Europe and in diverse art fairs, as Art Brussels or Art Basel.