Provenance: BorzoGallery Amsterdam, 1998 • Private collection
Was for sale / Sold
Gerardus ‘Geer’ van Velde (1898–1977) was a Dutch painter and watercolorist who moved to Paris in 1925 at the age of twenty-seven to establish himself there as a painter. Like his brother Bram, he initially produced colorful, expressionistic landscapes, figures, and still lifes.
From 1938 onward, his work underwent a radical transformation. That year he settled in Cagnes-sur-Mer in the south of France, where he developed a distinctive geometric-abstract visual language focused on the expression of light. Observed forms, as well as the light and the surrounding space, were transformed into a balanced interplay of lines and predominantly geometric planes in delicate, subtle color schemes.
Over the years, figuration gradually disappeared from his work, and the painter increasingly focused on achieving balance in composition. With exhibitions in 1946, 1948, and 1952 at the renowned Galerie Maeght in Paris, Van Velde’s name became firmly established in the postwar Parisian art world. In the Netherlands, it was the Amsterdam art dealer M. L. de Boer who first recognized his talent and devoted a first solo exhibition to him in 1971.
