News — Bram van Velde

There's a particular kind of artist whose reputation grows in the shadow of a bigger name, then slowly steps out of it. Bram van Velde is one of them. For decades he was "the painter Samuel Beckett wrote about"  a footnote to literary history rather than a headline in art history. That's changing, and it's worth asking why. Beckett's essays on van Velde , describing a painter who paints "having nothing to paint with, nothing to paint from, no power to paint, no desire to paint" — turned him into a kind of philosophical mascot for the impossibility of expression....