Léon Wuidar – VIEUX JEUX… dessins/​tekeningen/​drawings

We are pleased to announce the first solo of Léon Wuidar exclusively focusing on works on paper. Opening on Thursday, 26 October 2023 at Livourne 32, VIEUX JEUX… dessins/tekeningen/drawings will present a selection of works on paper to further the dialogue initiated at Art On Paper Brussels earlier in October.

Léon Wuidar and the practice of drawing

(b. 1938 in Liège, Belgium. Lives and works in Liège, Belgium)

Drawing is an integral part of Léon Wuidar’s artistic practice, but one rarely introduced to the public. Having first studied technical drawing at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Liège, he later became a professor, teaching drawing and graphic arts at the same institution for forty years.

Drawing is constitutive to Léon Wuidar’s daily routine and takes a variety of forms: in the morning, he meticulously colours sketches in his preparatory notebooks, laying the foundations for the paintings that follow; he designs covers for his friends’ journals or magazines; and he also possesses a whole inventory of paper objects such as his pedestal fans. Léon Wuidar is passionate about books and writing. He sometimes recovers their bindings and assembles them into collages. Like visual studies of language, some of his works play with words, occasionally revealing a concealed meaning while establishing links between the shape or appearance of one specific word, its sense and its phonetics. Eventually, the aesthetics of these works reveal compositions of the same precision as his paintings, though with somehow generally more subdued tonalities.

Wuidar’s work is held in international public collections and was most recently acquired by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France and the FRAC Normandie, Caen, France. Recent solo exhibitions include Bonisson Art Center, Rognes, France; White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, UK, MAC’s, Grand-Hornu, Belgium; Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich, Switzerland.