Born Abraham van den Boogaart in Delft in 1921, Bogart was initially trained as a house painter. He later briefly enrolled at the Fine Arts Academy in The Hague, principally as a way to avoid being conscripted into the German army. During his long career, he worked through numerous stylistic shifts including an early period of figuration, followed by cubist geometric abstraction, gestural abstraction and finally sensually coloured sculptural paintings with heavy accumulations of paint, for which he became widely acclaimed.
Bogart was primarily an abstract painter who immersed himself in the formal concerns of painting. Foregrounding gesture, colour and the physical materiality of paint itself, his works are characterised by their rich, almost sculptural accumulations of painted matter. Working through numerous stylistic investigations, including figuration, pointillism and cubism, from the late 1950s onwards he focused exclusively on abstraction using his own signature medium: a dense mix of pure pigments, oils and water combined with other undisclosed materials. Constantly adapting the composition of his paint, he was able to achieve a variety of thicknesses, intensities and textural effects, ‘building’ with paint to fuse gesture with matter in muscular works that forcefully assert their three-dimensional presence.
His work has been exhibited in many institutions and galleries, and is held in numerous public collections such as Prinsenhof Museum, Delft, The Netherlands; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, The Netherlands; Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Schiedam, The Netherlands; Gemeente Museum Den Haag, The Hague, The Netherlands; Centraal Museum Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands; Museum van Bommel van Dam, Venlo, The Netherlands; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, The Netherlands; Gemeentemuseum Helmond, Helmond, The Netherlands; Nederlandse Staats collective, The Netherlands; Musée royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium; Musée d’Ixelles, Brussels, Belgium; S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium; Groeningemuseum, Bruges, Belgium; Mu.ZEE, Ostend, Belgium; KMSKA, Antwerp, Belgium; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Liège, Liège, Belgium; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Mons, Mons, Belgium; MUDAM Luxembourg, Luxembourg; Le Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Nice; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Göteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden; Sundsvalls Museum, Sundsvall, Sweden; Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland; Public Art Museum NGV, Melbourne, Australia; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia; and TATE Modern, London, UK.
