About the artist
Christian Dotremont was born on December 12, 1922 in Tervuren in Belgium. He is a Belgian painter and poet and was a founding member of the Revolutionary Surrealist Group (1946). He became involved with the Surrealist movement with the aim to reveal the many facets of art.
He was also one of the founders of CoBrA together with Danish artist Asger Jorn. It is Asger Jorn who introduces Dotremont to Galerie Birch, led by the charismatic art dealer and founder of the gallery, Børge Birch. Dotremont quickly becomes a personal friend of Birch and many years later, long after the dissolution of the Cobra-group, he continued to keep a close contact with the gallery in Copenhagen.
As an artist who experimented with art throughout he became well-known for his painted poems, called Peinture mots in French, which he called logogrammes. He defines them as something between images and words. Dotremont painted these “pictures of words, and words of pictures” throughout his entire life.
Dotremont caused the most important scandal to hit CoBrA; at the group’s exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam he hijacked the attention by making a lengthy political speech in favor of communism. The Dutch spectators were instantly provoked by this hard language. After this full-blown brawl several of the CoBrA-members withdrew from the movement. Clashes and disputes such as this, inevitably cause the group to dissolve in 1951.
Dotremont died of tuberculosis in Tervuren on August 20, 1979.
Christian Dotremont is featured in the following Danish public collections; Museum Jorn in Silkeborg, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, AROS, The Kastrupgaard collection, Randers Museum of Art, KUNSTEN in Ålborg, Horsens Museum of Art, Funen Museum of Art.
Besides these Dotremont is part of many international public and private collections.
