Willem Van Hecke

Self-taught Belgian painter, born in 1893 and died in 1976 in his native Blankenberge. He began in the 1920s with delicate genre scenes; his palette darkened and his compositions grew more powerful around 1930, with figures reduced to their essential plastic forms. During the 1950s he moved toward abstraction and later toward a form of art brut close to Dubuffet. His work is held in the collections of the Belgian State, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent and the museum in Ostend.