The Artwork of Bruno Vekemans
Born in 1952 at Berchem, a southern district of Antwerp, Bruno Vekemans was a Belgian painter, draftsman and etcher. Considered a post-modernist, he was primarily concerned
with figurative work which included portraits. Vekemans also created urban landscapes and anecdotal scenes with characters.
As a child and later a teenager, Bruno Vekemans was constantly engaged in drawing and painting. He enrolled at the Technicum de Londenstraat, an industrial arts and design school, where he took several courses in decoration. Vekemans also had some basic training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berchem. His skill at drawing was heavily influenced by his many visits to Antwerp’s Museum of Fine Arts where he studied the works of the Flemish masters as well as the early works of expressionist painter James Ensor.
Vekemans was, however, basically self-taught; his own unique strong and mysterious style was developed after years of experimentation with shape and color. His painting underwent various modifications before its dramatic resolution in the 1990s. Vekemans started his experiments with different techniques in 1971, 
using collages, comics, and églomisé, the application of a design and gilding on the rear face of glass. He often started his work with various photos or images from magazines, to which he added, combined or eliminated elements.
In 1988, Bruno Vekemans focused on linear works, most of which were applications of gouache on patterned paper. He later replaced the patterned paper with seventeenth-century paper and also began experiments with oil paints on canvas. Vekemans simplified the image and used chiaroscuro to create different lighting effects. He used vibrant, intense colors, often transparent with different levels of opacity in tones tinged with blues, browns and blacks. Throughout his paintings, collages and drawings, Vekemans maintained an aura of solitude and mystery in both his portraits and cityscapes.
Vekemans frequently exhibited in the Netherlands, Belgium, Japan, Austria, France, Australia and the United States. His first verified exhibition 
was at Amsterdam’s Jaski Art Gallery in 2006. An important step in Vekemans’s career was his 2015 exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro. Other notable exhibitions were retrospectives at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires and Havana’s Museo Nacional de Belas Artes de Cuba where he exhibited his thematic series on Cuba. A posthumous retrospective of his work, “Bruno Vekemans: Zelfportrettten”, was held in 2023 at Antwerp’s Galerie Verbeeck-Van Dyck.
Bruno Vekemans passed away on the twenty-second of July in 2019, a week before his sixty-seventh birthday. In 2020, he was posthumously named an honorary citizen of the Antwerp municipality of Brasschaat.
Second Insert Image: Bruno Vekemans, “Man Met Koffer (Man with Suitcase)”, Date Unknown, Gouache on Paper, 79 x 57 cm, Private Collection
Bottom Insert Image: Bruno Vekemans, “Tango Dancer”, 1895, Gouache on Patterned Paper, 92 x 78 cm, Private Collection