Tribute to her father, artist Piet Killaars, who moved with the spirit of the times with integrity

A daughter who pays homage to her deceased father through an exhibition of their work, that is a rare event. Visual artist Fransje Killaars (Maastricht 1959) made an installation around a group of sculptures and studies by her father, sculptor Piet Killaars (Tegelen, 1922 – Maastricht, 2015). The group of works by Piet Killaars was donated to Museum Beelden aan Zee by Killaars’ heirs and his wife Hélène last year.

Fransje Killaars has been making spatial installations with textiles for thirty years: wool carpets and blankets, strips of fabric, transparent veils and folding screens in bright and contrasting colours. The cultural-historical significance of fabrics and of weaving and printing techniques plays an important role in this. But there is also a clear echo of modernism, of the color fields of American colorfield painters such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, and of the geometric grids of Sol LeWitt, for whom Fransje Killaars once worked as an assistant in the execution of his wall drawings. She transformed the modernist tradition into a sensuous kind of art, which is about tangibility and materiality and about the experience of intimacy.

In Beelden aan Zee, Fransje Killaars covered two rows of three pillars with hand-printed strips of fabric in yellow, orange, green and purple. She placed a long table in between, in such a way that a kind of chapel was created. Two of her human figures, dressed in a white and a black cape, kneel at the ends of the table. They are reminiscent of images in Renaissance paintings. On the table are two small sculptures, in white and black, models of a work that Piet Killaars realized in Maastricht in the 1970s, Movement in space. They look like a stylized, ascending wave movement, which is made up of overlapping, roof tile-like elements. Other statues and plaster models, including variants of Movement in Spaceas golf and Spiral. The installation is dedicated to mourning and contemplation, while at the same time celebrating life with exuberant colours.

Guiding principle

Meanwhile, the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht is showing an overview of Piet Killaars’ works, all from its own collection. There you can see how his artistry has developed over the decades. This oeuvre is a faithful reflection of broader trends in art, starting in the fifties with existentialist sculpture groups and human figures influenced by his teacher Oscar Jespers. In the 1970s, the work is more abstract and geometric, with stacks and spiral arrangements, in bronze, marble and stone. In the 1980s Killaars was influenced by the experience of nature and by transience and vulnerability, as can be seen in Passage, Gate and Boat, made of oak and iron. The boat and the gate are both oval, shell-like shapes, made up of sections, one horizontal, the other vertically erected.

In all the different phases of his work, Killaars proves to be a child of his time. Yet there is a guiding principle that has remained constant over the years. In an interview he called this the creative principle, a principle of growth and development that is unruly and inescapable. Killaars perceived a different layer in the appearance of things and was committed to a natural principle that is much more, or goes much further, than his own artistry. This observation resulted in a meaningful and honest oeuvre.