Jan Theuninck

Jan Theuninck is a living Belgian painter and poet, born in 1954 in Zonnebeke, a village in Flanders whose fields were fought over in the First World War. He paints in a spare, near-monochrome abstraction, single fields of colour close to the work of Ellsworth Kelly, the American colour painter he admires.

For Theuninck the painting and the poem are two sides of one act. His subjects are political: war, the Holocaust, colonialism and the case for peace, and he gives a canvas and a poem the same title so each stands for the other. A native Dutch speaker, he writes his poetry mostly in French. He still lives and works in the Flemish countryside where he was born.