Hugo Claus: Aan de andere kant van woorden

Hugo Claus was widely known to the general public as a writer and poet. Few people, however, were aware that he possessed a remarkable dual talent. Throughout his entire career, he also created visual art. This exhibition, featuring more than 150 drawings, watercolors, collages, and gouaches, offered a representative overview of this visual oeuvre.

The drawings sought a level of visual detail that his poems could not provide. In his visual work, Hugo Claus searched for something that lay on the other side of words. The drawings and gouaches were, neither more nor less, annotations to the poems. They were sustained by poetry. This was what the poet needed—to sharpen the baroque precision of his verse.

Like an Italian Renaissance artist, who would often paint and sculpt simultaneously, practice architecture, and also wield the pen or combine a keen interest in the natural sciences with music and philosophy, Hugo Claus too was a true artistic polymath.

MVGallery, Knokke (2018 - 2025)