Born in Deventer, the Netherlands in 1960, Erik Renssen is an independent artist - an intellectual assembler of images. What started as a modest beginning in the field of oil painting has developed over the past three decades into a prolific international artistic career. He is now an established artist with a steadily growing group of admirers and collectors. Although Renssen is primarily a painter, his constant curiosity has drawn him to the charms of other artistic mediums. He enjoys making bronze sculptures and has ventured into the graphic arts, creating limited edition lithographs and linocuts. He explores the boundaries of his talent and does not feel any limitations when it comes to colour, style and subject matter. Portraiture, still life, cityscapes and representations of family life are frequent themes in his art. Renssen’s admiration for the work of Pablo Picasso has resulted in a meticulous study of the great master’s work. He has internalised Picasso’s visual language and he uses it to paint his own personal stories. Renssen’s blonde women are not Marie-Thérèse but rather the women in his own life. The Notre Dame becomes the Rijksmuseum, Paris becomes Amsterdam, the coffee pot he paints might be the one that was across the table from him at breakfast... Gallery is proud to represent Renssen in Washington, DC. The premises of Guarisco Gallery, located in the heart of the international community, make it an appropriate setting for a contemporary artist who is part of the ongoing tradition of Dutch art.
CLAUDE VÉNARD French Born: Paris, 1913 Died: Sanary-sur-Mer, France, 1999 “We must be wary of works that seduce at first glance. By this I don’t mean to say that ugliness is the greatest of virtues—only that a work must inspire because of its own worth, without the intermediary of gracious artifices” -Claude Vénard Claude Vénard was born in Paris to an established, middle-class family from Bourgogne. Although he was a businessman, his father accepted and supported his devotion to the arts. The blossoming artist was accepted at the prestigious École des Beaux-arts but quickly rejected the formality of traditional academic art training. Instead, Vénard began attending night courses at the École de Arts Appliqués at age seventeen to supplement his independent education. After six years of dedicated study the painter was forced, due to economic difficulties, to withdraw from the school and seek employment. Vénard became a restoration specialist at the Louvre to support himself in 1936. The artist considered his experiences conserving Old Master paintings to be invaluable to the development of his style and technique. In the same year that he started working at the Louvre, Vénard participated in a group show at Galerie Billet-Worms. Respected art critic Waldemar George hailed the exhibition as an immense success, proclaiming, “Let’s be young again! Painting is not dead. Its course has not stopped. Forces Nouvelles is born.” The Forces Nouvelles movement, which included artists like André Marchand and Francis Gruber, promoted a new form of figuration, marked by the rejection of Impressionism, Cubism and Surrealism. Their aim was to revive French art by reinstating strict principles of draftsmanship, while maintaining an expressive vigor relevant to the values of contemporary life. Over time, however, the group of Parisian artists became radically figurative, which did not appeal to Vénard any more than it did to Marchand or Gruber. In 1939, Forces Nouvelles officially disbanded, but Vénard remained friends with many of its members. His first one-man exhibition was held at the Galerie Barreiro in Paris in 1944. He exhibited successfully around the world for the rest of his career, including shows in London, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Dusseldorf, Munich, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo. Claude Venard enjoyed significant success in his lifetime and is beloved by modern collectors for his fearless and innovative approach to cubism.