Guy Vandenbranden was born in Brussels, on July 14, 1926 and died in Antwerp, on June 3, 2014. He was a Belgian artist. He has worked as a painter, draftsman, collage artist, sculptor and graphic artist.
From 1951 onwards, Guy Vandenbranden said goodbye to figuration and started to work in a constructive expressionistic abstraction to finally become an important geometric abstract artist.
Guy Vandenbranden is generally associated with the second-generation Belgian constructivists, who achieved a complete geometric abstraction, following the steps of Piet Mondriaan and of Victor Vasarely he becomes a follower of the “Modulor” of Le Corbusier.
Vandenbranden’s artistic career began at the L’Effort academy in Brussels, which was frequented by artists who loathed the prevailing academic art of that time. Initially creating abstract assemblages, reliefs and objects, with a sober color palette and many grey shades, in the late fifties Vandenbranden evolved to purely abstract-geometric paintings in which he wanted the artistic expression to be determined solely by the visual means themselves: lines, planes and colors. His paintings became chromatically more complex, yet, without abandoning strict geometric lines.
Spatiality is achieved by crosscutting the brightly colored planes; combinations with broad, black lines give his work an emotional tension. In the fifties and sixties Vandenbranden was a member of the Belgian Art Abstrait and Art Construit groups and co-founder of Formes and De Nieuwe Vlaamse School, i.e. movements propagating geometric abstract art with a theoretical basis.
From the late seventies onwards Vandenbranden also started to work on monumental commissions that included the integration of his work within the architecture.
On June 3, 2014, Guy Vandenbranden died in Antwerp.
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