Jan Dries

About Jan Dries

Jan Dries was a founding member of G58 and of De Nieuwe Vlaamse School. He made a name for himself in the 1950s with his autonomous ceramic sculptures. Following his philosophical nature, he sought a path he had already entered through photography in which a fascination for the light arose. He aimed for pure forms in which color gave way to a gift of light. After first having experimented with plaster in 1959-1960, he worked with the more light-absorbing white Carrara marble mainly.

“Light and dark determine what I try to shape in marble. Inspiration gives light its own way of existence in a specific volume. Light’s versatility within the shape’s characteristics is the other of the one represented by space. The one is the other. In essence such an image made into a balance of light bears meditation, a kind of all-time: an indefinable own being that has brought into being an a-dimensional space in time.”

Born in 1925, passed away in 2014.