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.

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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.

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WILLEM de LOOPER: Paintings 1968-1972 is on view at HEMPHILL through February 26, 2022.

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.

Purchase Catalogue

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.