Carel Willink - Door Carel Willink gesigneerde kleurenzeefdruk | 'Chateau en Espagne' | 1979 - Sold

Beautiful magical realistic work by Carel Willink. Published in 1979 following a work from 1939.

Hand-signed by Carel Willink himself.

Issued in an edition of 75 copies. This concerns one of the ten proofs (PDA).

Collection is preferred due to the size of the work.
In 1931, Carel Willink made a tour of Italy, visiting the cities of Bologna, Milan and Florence, among others. Here he was reacquainted with the work of artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, master of the Pittura Metafisica. The influence of De Chirico is clearly visible in Château en Espagne, where Willink, like De Chirico, works with strong light-dark contrasts and abandoned, mysterious-looking classical architecture. The composition is a balance between landscape, sky and buildings. The sun shines on the ruined villa in the background as well as on the classical statue of the Greek god Apollo in the foreground. This statue is in the gardens of Versailles, of which Willink kept a photo. In this canvas he staged this sculpture in a French landscape with the ruin he sketched during one of his travels. The threatening clouds connect the different elements in this painting, and form a contrast with the static objects. Life and death, bloom and fall: these opposites are all reflected in the work. The title Château en Espagne is a French expression and literally means 'castle in the air', referring to the unattainable. Nevertheless, the work will have been taken a bit more literally in its own time. For many, the ruined castle referred to the situation in Spain, where a civil war had been raging since 1936, which in turn foreshadowed the Second World War that broke out in 1939, the year in which this painting was created. (source museum Arnhem).