SOFACQ Gallery

Antwerp painter from figuration to abstraction.

He was Born in Antwerp in 1889 as the son of a sculptor. His brother Oscar also becomes a sculptor.

He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and became a painter.

 

In 1918 he initially works in the style of Rik Wouters, which he worked during W.O. I met in the Netherlands. From 1918 he became more cubist, leaning towards abstraction. he performs in musicals with his brother and in this way meets the writer and poet Paul van Ostaijen, who introduces him to modernist circles. Together with the Antwerp painter Paul Joostens they founded the "union without sealed paper". Van Ostaijen cites Jespers and his son Marc in his most famous poems.

 

In the 1920s he realizes his best work. He often works in Knokke, where he is a guest with doctor De Beir, a doctor during the war in Zeist (where Rik Wouters is staying). De Beir buys many cubist works from Jespers before he plunges into the new avant-garde, Flemish expressionism. In 1929, he had his house on 40 Marialei in Antwerp renovated by architect Frits de Mont in a modernist style (the building still exists). In 1932 Léon Stynen redesigned the facade, in 1941 he designed an extra roof floor for the extension of the studio, which Jespers "as creator of the great tapestries of Paris and New York" needs. In 1937 he was commissioned to design cartons for the monumental tapestries in the Belgian Pavilion at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris. Becomes famous for his "églomisés", behind-glass paintings with clowns as a theme.

 

In 1951 Jespers moves to Congo, where his painting is flourishing again. In 1965 he dies in Antwerp