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Willy Boers

Willy Boers (1905-1978)

Willy Boers was born in Amsterdam in 1905. He lived and worked in Amsterdam and Paris, where he started out as a restorer of paintings before he started painting.

Willy boers was an important and influential Dutch abstract painter of the Dutch 'post war' period. He founded the '12 schilders' group in 1946, including talented painters like Ger Gerrits, Frieda Hunziker and Wim Sinemus.

Shortly after, Boers formed the Dutch 'Vrij Beelden' group (1947) . With Ger Gerrits he was co-founder of the Dutch 'Creatie' group in 1950, including Armando, Piet van Stuivenberg, Wim Crowel, Andre van der Vossen, Hans Ittmann and Juul Neumann amongst others.

Willy Boers is influenced by Paul Klee, Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky and Joan Miro. His work demonstrates great craftsmanship and the use of colours applied with a great sense of balance.

Works of Willy Boers in exhibitions in Indonesia, Amsterdam, Paris, Germany and Switzerland. Paintings in various museums, including the 'Cobra museum of Modern Art’ in Amstelveen (Holland).

'About abstraction' by Willy Boers:

In his closing words of the summary accompanying an exhibition dedicated to his latter works held at the Fodor Museum in Amsterdam in 1974, Willy Boers (1905-1978) wrote the following:

"After the war it seemed impossible for me and artists in many countries to carry on sculpting images of the external forms of the world around us. The foundation of the "Salon des Réalités Nouvelles" in 1948, an extension of the group of 'Abstraction Creation' (1932-1936) in Paris, gave shape to and stimulated these ideas.

The objectives were comprehensively described in their first manifestation. An art of lines, forms and colours interpreting and expressing an inner shape or form were propagated.

These images, descibed in 1912 by Kandinsky in his book ‘Ueber das Geistige in der Kunst’ and again later in his 1926 publication of ‘Punkt und Linie zu Fläche’, were widely accepted by many groups of artists.

The boundaries of a national art faded. Artists from all over the free world exhibited together and worked further towards a movement wich had been given an extra stimulus by the Dutch ‘Style group’ and Russian constructivism.

This was a general counter-reaction to the conformist realism pervading the world of Art. A tangible international quest developed towards the reality behind the reality".