Belgian artist Walter Swennen, known for playful and experimental paintings, has died at 79. His death was announced by Xavier Hufkens, which represents him.
“Walter’s passing is an immense loss, both personally and artistically,” Xavier Hufkens said in a statement. “He was a dear friend and a true visionary, whose thinking was as uncompromising as it was free. We will miss him profoundly, but his spirit will endure, inspiring and challenging generations to come.”
Born in Brussels in 1946, Swennen first pursued poetry and performance in the 1960s before turning to painting—at first privately, then publicly in the early 1980s. He briefly studied philosophy at Saint-Louis University in Brussels and engraving at Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. He graduated with a master’s in psychology from the Université Catholique de Louvain in 1973.
Swennen’s paintings often incorporated words in multiple languages, alongside comic book figures and everyday motifs that he treated irreverently. He drew inspiration from sources as varied as free jazz, philosophy, street signage, and art history. After his initial pursuit of poetry, language remained central to his art practice, through which he endeavored to unsettle fixed meanings.
In 1981, Swennen presented his first solo exhibition at Gallery Patrick Verelst in Antwerp. That same year, he showed his paintings at the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, which would later be the venue for his first institutional show in 1986. He quickly became a central figure in Belgian painting, rising to prominence alongside artists exploring the material limits of the medium, such as Marcel Broodthaers.
Swennen’s work was the subject of major international exhibitions, including “So Far So Good” at WIELS in Brussels in 2013, “Ein perfektes Alibi” at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf in 2015, and “La pittura farà da sé” at La Triennale di Milano in 2018. A retrospective opened at Kunstmuseum Bonn in Germany in 2021 before traveling to Kunstmuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands and Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland.
Xavier Hufkens began representing Swennen in 2014. In 2015, Gladstone Gallery started representing the artist and has presented three solo shows over the last decade.
