In the expressive paintings of Dutch born, Belgian artist Bram Bogart (1921-2012) the focus is on paint as physical matter and the medium’s material possibilities. Primarily an abstract artist, Bogart explored how the ‘script’ of a painting or the ‘non-repetitive element of rhythmical brush strokes’ could imbue abstraction with meaning. During his long career, Bogart immersed himself in the formal concerns of painting, working through numerous stylistic shifts including an early period of figuration, followed by cubist geometric abstraction, gestural abstraction and finally sensually coloured sculptural paintings with heavy accumulations of paint, for which he became widely acclaimed. Through a process of ‘building’ with paint he fused gesture with matter, to produce powerfully physical paintings with a sculptural, three-dimensional presence. Born Abraham van den Boogaart in Delft in 1921, Bogart first trained as a house painter, before working as a commercial sign painter for the cinema in Rotterdam. He studied art via a correspondence course and then briefly at the Fine Arts Academy in The Hague, principally as a way to avoid being conscripted into the German army. After the War in 1946 Bogart moved to France, working in Paris and the village of Le Cannet on the Côte d’Azur. Over the next 10 years, his work evolved from figuration – primarily landscapes and still lives – to more rigidly symmetrical depictions of houses and trees, which emphasised the horizontal and vertical axes of the composition. It was in his cellar studio in Le Cannet that Bogart first began to experiment with mixing water-soluble and oil-based paints, achieving an intense colouration and a chalky, matt finish which was inspired, in part, by the facades of the surrounding architecture. By the 1950s, the figurative aspect of his work had become schematic, resolving into abstract symbols placed within defined sections of the composition. Bogart remained in Paris during the 1950s, renting a shared studio space in an old leather works on rue Santeuil, during which time his work became more gestural and expansive. In paintings such as Cristal Baroque (1959), a gestural script is embedded into a thickly painted, coagulated surface − the paint a register of physical activity having been pushed, drawn or pulled across the canvas.