Roger Raveel

(Belgian, 1921–2013)

Roger Raveel was a Belgian painter known for probing the border between reality and fiction in his work. Raveel playfully arranged motifs culled from everyday life, morphing bicyclists, birds, and striped poles closer or further away from abstraction depending on the painting. Born on July 15, 1921 in Machelen-aan-de-Leie, Belgium, he went on to study at the art academies in both Ghent and Deinze. Raveel notably made a pilgrimage to visit the elderly artist James Ensor during the mid-1940s in the town of Ostend. Ensor’s themes sometimes manifested themselves in Raveel’s work, as seen in his Memory of my Mother’s Deathbed (1965) which recalls the former artist’s My Dead Mother (1915). Raveel died at the age of 91 on January 30, 2013 in Deinze, Belgium. Today, his works are held in the collections of SMAK (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst) in Ghent, the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, Netherlands, and the Roger Raveel Museum in his hometown of Machelen-aan-de-Leie, among others.