Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - La femme métamorphosée en puce – 2007

Robert Detheux (1932-2010) – The Woman Metamorphosed into a Flea – 2007 Artist: Robert Detheux (Brussels, 1932 – Tournai, 2010) Title of the work: The Woman Metamorphosed into a Flea Date: 2007 Signature: Signed and dated “Detheux 2007”. Title inscribed at the bottom. Technique: Mixed media on paper. Pencil, white highlights and light erasures. The figure is built from nerve-like lines and white modeling, the background is reserved and slightly tinted. Light, nervous texture. Dimensions: 51.5 × 37 cm Condition: Very good overall condition. The material is held, the drawing legible, the white highlights clear, the signature and title legible. Atelier paper marked by handling at the margins, but no damage to the figure. Sold unframed. Provenance: Artist’s atelier fund (acquired directly). Description: Work from 2007. Detheux was seventy-five years old. The drawing belongs to the final period: metamorphoses, apparitions, creatures. A nude woman, seen in profile, body curved and taut. The head is human, eyes open, gaze fixed. Arms are raised, hands grip cords or chains that run upward. The lower part of the body is transforming. The legs and pelvis extend into segmented forms, into appendages, into something no longer human. The inscribed title makes this explicit: she metamorphoses into a flea. This is not a scene. It is a transformation in progress. The female body, a constant subject for Detheux, here tilts into the animal, into the insect. The white highlights sharpen the volumes, the lines stay nervous. The reserved, golden background does not isolate the figure: it allows it to unravel. We are in the Belgian Surrealism of Detheux’s late period: the body becomes a creature, metamorphosis is the subject, the drawing is at once precise and unstable. The work does not quote; it shows the transformation. Signed, titled, dated, in good format, and with a rare material in the collection: a significant piece from the 2007 years, for lovers of drawing and mixed technique Belgian collectors sensitive to metamorphic figures and creatures. Artist biography: Born in Brussels in 1932 and passed away in Tournai in 2010, Robert Detheux is a singular figure in Belgian art of the 20th century. A graduate of the Saint-Luc Institute of Fine Arts in Brussels, he taught graphic expression at the Academy of Tournai until 1996, while pursuing a personal body of work with great coherence. From the 1950s, he established himself with a very personal surrealist and graphic language. He received the Belgian Young Painter Prize in 1953, 1954 and 1971. The following decades deepen the same territory. 1970s: the female body and face, hybrid figures, textures. 1980s-1990s: grotesque, eroticism, black humor. 2000-2010: spectral portraits, apparitions, creatures. The present work fully belongs to this latest moment. Little exhibited in his lifetime, Detheux worked freely. The discovery of his atelier fund (nearly 1,500 works) revealed this coherence. His drawing, demanding and immediately recognizable, now attracts collectors of Belgian surrealism in Belgium, Spain and Europe.

Estimation:€200

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