Best wishes for 2023 — De Jonckheere Gallery
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Best wishes for 2023

Welcome to the latest De Jonckheere Gallery newsletter. It has been a busy year for us, full of excitement and experimentation. After a long break due to covid, we were thrilled to began adventurously in the springtime, when we collaborated with Philippe Austruy to create a highly unusual exhibition at his stunning vineyard, La Commanderie de Peyrassol in Provence. The show paired Old Masters from our collection with contemporary pieces from Philippe’s, so as to generate a series of unexpected associations – some of them quiet dialogues, others noisy clashes. If you saw it, we hope you will agree that it was a fascinating and unconventional curation.

The annual round of art fairs took place in the summer this year, later than usual. At BRAFA in Brussels we exhibited a mix of Old Masters and contemporary works. There were several intriguing pieces by Lucio Fontana, among them two of his celebrated ‘spatial concepts’ series, where a monochrome canvas is transformed by careful incisions, and then a wonderful egg-shaped bronze entitled Natura. We showed these alongside a pair of works in which humans defy Nature: the doomed Icarus and the hubristic Phaeton, both painted by Pieter Gijsels.

For us, TEFAF in Maastricht was centred on Pieter Brueghel the Younger, an artist who never ceases to amaze and delight. We reunited a set of three tondi depicting the seasons: spring, summer, winter. Each of the scenes is a snapshot of village life. We see peasants carousing merrily or just trudging along. And as ever with Brueghel, the human figures are portrayed with cheerful wit and wry affection.

We took another work by the same Brueghel – his gloriously boisterous Wedding Dance Outside – to BIAF in Florence. From there we headed to London for Frieze, where we curated a set of works reflecting on Hieronymus Bosch, on the troubling monsters that his mind and his brush created in such profusion.

Our marathon of art fairs ended back in France at Paris Fine Arts & La Biennale. Though, in fact, there is one more show to come before the year is out. It involves a collaboration with some dear colleagues at an exciting new space:1, avenue Matignon in Paris. .

In the meantime, let us say how much we are looking forward to a new year. We hope it will be full of opportunities to meet you, to show you some fabulous paintings, and to continue our journey in art.