Karel Vereycken
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→ CONTEMPORARY ART CURATOR MAGAZINE, Interview https://www.contemporaryartcuratormagazine.com/home-2/karel-vereycken-interview
→ London-based contemporary Art Magazine DIVIDE, two page feature with 5 engravings,
→ MODERN RENAISSANCE MAGAZINE, London, UK, two page article with 5 etchings and watercolors;
→ 100 ARTISTS OF EUROPE selected to be included in the 2026 edition of this book by Culturale Lab, Lyon, France;
→ ARTISTCLOSEUP, Interview https://www.artistcloseup.com/blog/interview-karel-vereycken
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→ December 2025: Galerie Mona Lisa, 32, rue de Varenne, Paris 75007.
→ November 2025: Estampes d'Automne, Atelier de gravure Bo Halbirk, 1, rue Garibaldi, 93200 Montreuil.
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→ COLLECTORS ART PRIZE | ART LEGENDS OF OUR TIME, a prize awarded by the Contemporary Art Curator Magazine every two years.
→ TOP IN CATEGORY AWARD for Printmaking by the Circle Foundation for the Arts (CFA), Los Angeles, USA;
→ NOVEMBER 2025 ARTIST OF THE MONTH of the Camelback Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA;
→ FINALIST CERTIFICATE for the Paris Exhibition of the Circle Foundation of the Arts, New York, USA;
→ TALENT PRIZE AWARD for the “13th Open” International Juried Art Competition of Teravarna, San Francisco, USA;
→ HONORABLE MENTION for the « 10th FIGURATIVE » contest of Teravarna, Los Angeles, USA ;
→ TALENT PRIZE AWARD for the “8th Animal” International Juried Art Competition of Teravarna, Los Angeles, USA;
→ HONORABLE MENTION AWARD for the “8th Water” International Juried Art Competition of Teravarna, Los Angeles, USA;
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I was born in 1957 in Antwerp. My parents worked in the port and the ship repair industry. Their adolescence, studies and careers were reduced to zero by the war period and the need to bring an income and feed their brothers, parents and family. So for their children, my parents thought we should have the occasion to fully enjoy and explore the cultural dimensions. My mother, who was prevented by the war to become an opera singer, got me into a music school. But at that time, the teaching methods, basically learning to read scores for two years before ever being allowed to sing, were so repugnant that I ran away from that. As an alternative, my mother sent me to a communal drawing school directed by a talented sculptor named Herman Cornelis. The bearded cigar-smoking giant would rip pages out of old books and stick them in my hands saying “copy this!”
At the same time, my father would take me every weekend to visit the numerous museums of Antwerp where paintings of Bruegel, Rembrandt, Bosch, Rubens, Van Eyck and many other Flemish masters were on show. Father couldn’t really explain why but knew this was somehow very important. Antwerp has also a well preserved XVIth century print shop of Christopher Plantin, a French humanist who worked in that city in the 16th century with many cartographers such as Mercator and Ortelius, whose engraved globes and printed maps impressed me deeply.
Then, at age 12, I won my first art prize and my teacher convinced my mother “there was precious talent” in me. With that advice, my mother sent me to Brussels to attend the Saint Luke Art School and study Plastic Arts. Some teachers were quite annoying but others got us into deep study of anatomy, examining Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer’s groundbreaking studies. I continued another two years at the Ecole Royale des Beaux Arts of Brussels to study copper engraving and got graduated “with distinction.”
I then moved to Paris and worked as a journalist and editor of a non-commercial militant paper. But after some years, I found out art was really lacking in my life so I returned to it. First by producing copies of old masters painting on wooden oak panels with hand-made egg tempera, venitian turpentine and various other ancient oil techniques I rediscovered with a friend of mine. Since the people that ordered these painting took them home, at the end, I had nothing to put on show. Therefore, I returned to watercolors and etching. I also gave a three year course of drawing for some of my friends, mainly amateurs and beginners.
Today, in France, I am a member of the Fédération nationale de l'Estampe and a member of the Montreuil workshop of Danish engraver Bo Halbirk.
What always attracted me in painting and imagining is the way art “makes visible” things and ideas that are “not visible” as such in the simple visible world but which “appear” in the minds of the viewer. It took me over twenty years to sort out the difference between “symbols” (a “convention” accepted among a group or a code system designed to communicate a secret meaning), and “metaphor” which by assembling things unusual, by irony and paradox, allows the individual mind to “discover” the meaning the painter intended to transmit. Such an approach offers the joy of discovery and surprise, a deep human quality. Modern art started as a non-figurative form of symbolism till “contemporary” art brought many artists to put an axe into the very idea of poetical meaning.
In 1957, the CIA sponsored, under various covers and often without the artists even knowing about it, many “abstract” artists to promote a form of art that it considered coherent with its ideology of “free enterprise.” So what inspires me is true human culture, be it Chinese painting of the Song dynasty, the Buddhist sculptures of Gandhara, the early Flemish masters or the magnificent bronze heads of Ifé in current Nigeria. Bridging the distances in space and time, religion and philosophy, stands the celebration of unique human capacities, that of compassion, empathy and love.
