Works
Colette Duck has a very eclectic approach that articulates around physical, chemical and ecological transformations. Her interest in constant changes and multiple deformations of landscapes, mountains and urban visages erupts in her paintings, drawings, etchings, photographs, videos, sculptures and installations.
Her compositions are no pure representations but assume a nonetheless pure pictorial aspect in which colours - whether they be explosive, scarce or ethereal - are of primordial significance.
Her starting point, however, is always transformation and mutation of the expanding universe, in an infinite evolution of every person or animal with very instinctive personal developments. The endless small cosmological transformation overlaps her own feminine body and her relation to the outside world. Her work is structured around patient comprehension of the unpredictability and irreversibility of time.
Text from Claude Lorent, Els Wuyst, Constantin Chariot - Patinoire Royale Galerie Valerie Bach.
Belgian-German artist born in 1949, Colette Duck explores the physical, chemical, and environmental transformations of matter, often at the boundary between abstraction and figuration. Her works capture the irreversibility of time.
She graduated from the École Supérieure des Arts Saint-Luc in Brussels in 1972, where she taught until 2015. Starting in 1970, she studied the marble landscapes of Carrara and exhibited at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and at international fairs.
In 1981, she won the AICA Critics' Award for her “Cobalt Evolving Paintings.” In 1984, she participated with her Thermographies and photographic series in "Art and Time," an itinerant exhibition from the Rath Museum, shown at the Museum Moderne Kunst Wien, Louisiana Museum, and Barbican Centre, as well as "Signs and Writings" at the Grand Palais in Paris.
In 1988, she combined painting and glass with the master glassmaker Egidio Costantini in Murano. Her first retrospective took place in 1991 at the Espace Médicis. In 1994, she exhibited at the Goethe Institute in Brussels, and in 1996 and 2002, at the Austro-German summit of Wetterstein, the Zugspitze. In 2022, she participated in "A Taste of Abstraction" at La Patinoire Royale, highlighting her position in Belgian postmodern abstraction.
Her works are included in the public collections of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the National Bank of Belgium, and Belfius, as well as in private collections across Europe, the United States, Hong Kong, and the Seychelles.
