De Ateliers is happy to invite you to the screening of the film René Daniëls by artist Erik van Lieshout on Tuesday January 31st from 5-6pm at De Ateliers. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the artist. The film is in Dutch and has English subtitles. Tickets for the screening are available on our website.

René Daniëls (b. Eindhoven, 1950) is one of the most renowned Dutch painters of the late twentieth century. In 1987 his career was abruptly interrupted by a stroke, from which he has never entirely recovered, and he did not begin to paint again for twenty years. When Daniëls was granted the Culture Prize from the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds for North Brabant in 2019, Van Lieshout came up with the idea of portraying Daniëls in a film and has created an intimate, upbeat yet subdued portrait of the artist. This is a film about what it is to be an artist, but also about the search for a dialogue with someone with whom no spoken words can be exchanged, and where facial expressions and yes/no answers assume intense meaning.

For this portrait van Lieshout followed Daniëls for more than a year. The significance of the artist’s early work and his position as an internationally renowned artist, who breathed life into the medium of painting comes up along the way. However, the emphasis of the film remains in the present, focused on the current life and art practice of Daniëls. And on the continuous attempts of Van Lieshout to make real contact and to have a dialogue and exchange on the meaning of art and painting with the mentally challenged Daniëls. During his time at Ateliers ’63 Van Lieshout was of the opinion that Daniëls’s work was too far removed from the socio-political reality of the time and in an attempt to understand it better, he has made copies of Daniëls’s best-known works throughout the filming process.

The film has been shown at Museum De Pont Tilburg and at Maureen Paley London in 2022.

Image: filmstill René Daniëls, Erik van Lieshout (2021)