musée l

In October 2024, the Gaston Bertrand Foundation will commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the death of its artist (1910-1994). To mark the occasion, the Foundation and the museum have joined forces to present the painter, surrounded by the nine winners of the Prix Gaston Bertrand, in an exhibition bringing together for the first time artists who, since receiving the award, have had the Bertrand name in common. Whether they were students of the master at the Ecole Supérieure Saint-Luc in Brussels, as were the first four prizewinners, or more broadly "Belgian painters with an already established inner world" as Bertrand himself wished when defining the conditions of his Prize, they were all rewarded for their highly interesting plastic qualities. Well-represented in the Musée L's collections, thanks to donations by Serge Goyens de Heusch, Gaston Bertrand will be given pride of place, notably through major works taken from the museum's reserves and shown for the duration of the exhibition in the main hall alongside works by the prizewinners. Gaston Bertrand, a founding member of the Jeune Peinture Belge in 1945, traversed 20th-century Belgian art between abstraction and reality, offering a personal pictorial proposition derived from his observations of landscape, architecture and the human figure, constantly decanted and geometrized. Constructed and elegant, demanding and meticulous, Bertrand's work, whether painted, watercolored, drawn or engraved, enriched modern Belgian art with its subtle, thoughtful plastic demonstrations, responding to the inner vision the master brought to bear for sixty years on the external world finely apprehended by his gaze, Bertrand's eulogy of stylistic purity.