✝ Peter Royen

In Peter Royen’s paintings the colour white is omnipresent. For him geometry, right angles, squares, rectangles, bars fit well with white. Sometimes they get lost in it, or even dissolve. In the silence of the clear structures, the white balances the delicate combination of form and language of his pictures in the foreground.

His colour of choice was not white from the beginning. The first pictures of his first exhibition featured red. But because art critics then spoke about the intense color as it moved through the forms, something had to be done. Peter Royen: “The red had to go, so that my forms could be better heard. Nothing should distract from the essence!..” Peter Royen creates his own environment, with the greatest concentration, clarity and honesty.

2011 FlowFineArt presented him with a different, lesser-known aspect of his work. For forty years a collection ofbeautiful woodcuts has remained in the dark, but can now be seen in a fine selection. The central theme of his woodcuts, and hand prints, is the artist’s wife Christine. She inspired the then 28-year-old artist with a very special atmosphere that shines through in the prints.

During the same period he created the plaster models that will be exhibited for the first time with us in this form. Originally formed as a template for casting metal casting, they are reflected in the contrast of Royen’s painting the same silence and emptiness of his work (again). Like his paintings, they are rather quiet, but here the most dynamic, with constant flow and movement.

For more than five decades the 88-year-old Peter Royen has been known as an intensive Ambassador of Fine Arts far beyond the borders of Düsseldorf, where he has lived since 1946.

He dedicates himself with exceptional sensitivity and power of art and firmly stands for the “freedom of art” and “respect for the artist”.

His great cultural and political commitment to the visual arts led far beyond the borders of Düsseldorf, such as in receiving of the Federal Cross of Merit.

His paintings can be found in major museums and numerous private collectors – the Dutch royal family has acquired several works. And not just because Peter Royen comes from the Netherlands: “My pictures are not loud, but very intense, and through time they just do not let you go.” Peter Royen has absolutely no trace of showmanship, the noted art critic Professor Werner Schmalenbach has called him the “Painter of Silence”.

He wrote about Royen:

“Of course he is, as each of his images, extraordinarily sensitive. But sensitivity is not much more than a commodity. It’s what you make of it. Peter Royen makes “his own quiet, lyrical, gently breathing images between the poles of the confines of the picture and the freedom of painting. He is a painter of silence. “