Willem de Looper | EXPO CHICAGO 2024
Willem de Looper paintings are being presented by the de Looper Foundation for the Arts @ EXPO Chicago 2024. The fair takes place from April 11 - 14, 2024.
Review | In the galleries: A filmmaker’s latest edition of souls on separate journeys
A spiritual journey through bustling D.C., inspiration in the American Southwest, an artist’s enhanced surroundings and works by seven African American artists
By Mark Jenkins for The Washington Post
February 23, 2024
Many color-field abstractionists have rejected the notion that their pictures look like landscapes, but sometimes the resemblance is hard to deny. Most of the vivid canvases in Hemphill Artworks’ “Willem de Looper: Paintings 1972-1975” were made soon after the Dutch-born D.C. artist’s 1973 trip to the American Southwest. The large pictures sweep horizontally and are usually in the colors of stone, sand and clay. (There are also three heavily blue ones, at least one of which predates the excursion.) The paintings are not literal landscapes, but the inspiration is palpable.
Art and the City: Colors and Crossroads
by Phil Hutinet for HillRag
February 13, 2023
In contrast to the exhibition “Willem de Looper: Paintings 1968 – 1972,” presented two years ago at HEMPHILL, “Paintings 1972 – 1975” marks a notable evolution in de Looper’s artistic approach. This transformation sets him apart from his Washington Color School peers, a group largely known for maintaining consistent painting methods throughout their careers.
In 1973, post initial acclaim, de Looper and his wife Frauke embarked on a cross-country journey across the United States. The expansive deserts and towering mountains of the American Southwest profoundly impacted the artist, proving a revelation for him as a DC resident who emigrated from Europe.
“Paintings 1972 – 1975,” stands as a distinct phase in the artist’s career or what the HEMPHILL calls “a second act,” affirming the artist’s enduring commitment to innovation and depth.
East City Art Reviews: Willem de Looper: Paintings 1968-1972
By Claudia Rousseau, P.h.D.
February 7, 2022
As we walked into Hemphill gallery’s elegant white spaces, a friend commented “it’s like a chapel”; an especially apt description of the sensation that emerges from this group of eleven paintings by Willem de Looper on exhibit here for the first time in many years. My friend was referring to the sense of calm, a meditative sensibility that one feels in seeing these luminous works together in an otherwise empty space.
In the Galleries: Willem de Looper
By Mark Jenkins for The Washington Post
February 5, 2022
Made over just four years, the luminous Willem de Looper abstractions in “Paintings, 1968-1972” demonstrate a subtle but significant transition. The 11 pictures at Hemphill Artworks, unexhibited for many years, shift from allover compositions to ones in which the watery colors are stacked horizontally, although still lushly blended.
WILLEM de LOOPER: Paintings 1968-1972 is on view at HEMPHILL through February 26, 2022.
WILLEM de LOOPER: Paintings 1968-1972 | Catalogue
WILLEM de LOOPER: Paintings 1968 – 1972, is on view at HEMPHILL through February 26, 2022.
HEMPHILL has partnered with the Frauke and Willem de Looper Foundation to showcase eleven paintings created between 1968 and 1972. Largely pulled from storage, and unseen by the public for many years, these works must be experienced in person to fully appreciate their immersive effect on the viewer.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, 40 pages with 11 full color reproductions, published by HEMPHILL Artworks and the Frauke and Willem de Looper Foundation.
The Long Sixties: Washington Paintings in the Watkins and Corcoran Legacy Collections, 1957-1982
Curated by Jack Rasmussen
American University Museum at the Katzen Art Center, Washington DC
February 16 – August 9, 2021
"The American University Museum recently acquired 9,000 works from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, a Washington institution that closed its doors to the public in 2014. Together with our Watkins Collection we have an especially strong cache of works by Washington regional artists. While curating a show of Washington paintings drawn from our growing collections, I became interested in how my memories of a formative time in my life might be affecting my choice of artwork for this exhibition.
Every exhibition is an opportunity to address what we can see of the past from our contemporary perspective. My perspective includes the acknowledgement of persistent, systemic gender and racial injustice, bias, and violence that was present in the fifties, laid bare in the sixties, and continues to the present day. It is clear to me that the defining characteristic of most White mainstream art made between 1957 and 1982 in Washington was an adherence to aesthetic and commercial constraints that encouraged artists to remain silent when their voices are most needed. What pushback there was against this tendency was led by Black and women artists, whose work has been systematically underrepresented in the collections of Washington museums."
– Jack Rasmussen, Curator
Featuring Artists: Cynthia Bickley-Green, Lisa Montag Brotman, Allen Carter, Michael Clark, Manon Cleary, Robert D’Arista, Rebecca Davenport, Gene Davis, Willem de Looper, Jeff Donaldson, Thomas Downing, William S. Dutterer, Alan Feltus, Fred Folsom, Robert Franklin Gates, Sam Gilliam, Carol Brown Goldberg, Tom Green, Helene McKinsey Herzbrun, Michal Hunter, Val Lewton, Howard Mehring, William Newman, Kenneth Noland, Robin Rose, Joseph Shannon, Frank Anthony Smith, Carroll Sockwell, Alma Thomas, Franklin White, William Woodward, and Kenneth Victor Young.
View the exhibition and catalogue online in Museum@Home.
Steven Cushner & Willem de Looper
At Hemphill Fine Arts, Steven Cushner and Willem de Looper Put In The Work
March 14, 2018
John Anderson, Washington City Paper
The recent exhibitions at Hemphill Fine Art are about putting in the time. It is likely most people don’t consider artists as ones who punch clocks to produce work. This is an exhibition that dispels the myth that an artist must be moved by some unforeseen “inspiration” as the modus operandi behind how an abstract artwork gets made.
Steven Cushner & Willem de Looper
In the galleries: Zenith celebrates 40 years with two exhibitions in two spaces
March 9, 2018
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
REPRESENT
At Hemphill Fine Arts, a retrospective show that's bigger than the gallery
November 15, 2013
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"Several mini-shows nestle within “Represent,” Hemphill Fine Arts’s 20th-anniversary exhibition."
Willem de Looper: Paintings 1968-72
Whirlwind tour through the District’s many painting exhibits
February 9, 2012
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"By the late 1960s, he was employing the techniques pioneered by Morris Louis (who died in 1962), using multiple washes of thin acrylic pigment to produce rich tints and billowing forms. Louis called one of his series 'Veils,' and 'Purple Veil' is among the four large de Looper canvases in Hemphill Fine Arts’ 'Paintings 1968-72.'"