Real Life - Ilse D'Hollander

A contemplative exploration of Ilse D’Hollander’s poetic abstractions—where color, form, and silence converge.

Real Life is introduced and curated by Wells Fray-Smith. It is published in collaboration with Gallery Sofie Van de Velde on the occasion of the group exhibition Real Life. The publication gathers works by Ilse D’Hollander, Lois Dodd, Christopher Colm Morrin, Jesse Murry, Heidrun Rathgeb, Peter Shear, Trevor Shimizu, and Frank Walter, presenting a dialogue across generations and geographies around painting’s enduring engagement with lived experience.

The book explores how these artists, much like Ilse D’Hollander herself, use paint to address reality in its most porous, poetic, and capacious sense. Whether working through figuration or abstraction, their practices blur the boundaries between pigment and picture, illusion and observation, the tangible and the transcendental.

At its heart is Ilse D’Hollander’s quiet yet profound vision. Through sketchbooks and paintings from 1988 onward, she offered intimate glimpses of her daily surroundings—a window frame, a stairway, a cat—each rendered with the same precision and restraint that define her painting. These drawings were not preparatory studies but complete reflections on perception itself, acts of seeing that transformed the ordinary into the contemplative.