Brussel, Roberto Polo Gallery, 2016 Hardback, 168 pages, 29.5 x 24 cm, EN. ISBN 9781907363108.
The Music Boy exhibition at the New Art Gallery Walsall is the artist's first in the United Kingdom. A 168-page hardback, illustrated catalogue featuring extensive essays by Andrew Graham-Dixon and Martin Herbert, as well as a foreword by Charlotte Mullins was published on the occasion. The exhibition is titled after a quadriptych of paintings depicting the artist's grandmother and his uncle playing an accordion.Jan Vanriet's work mainly concerns the memory of history and the construction of pictorial surface. As Martin Herbert writes: "Vanriet builds up his paintings in layers, and the strata of underpainting have, in his case, a polyvalent quality. In some cases they form glazes that gift the paintings with an internal glow; in others, the half-visible ghosts of earlier paintings both reaffirm the idea that something is being held back, and situate Vanriet's paintings as a carefully wrought, crafted statement that has gone through stages in order to reach a conclusive point, like a phrase honed through multiple careful edits." Jan Vanriet's mother, father and uncle participated in the Resistance movement and were deported by the Nazis. His parents met in the Mauthausen concentration camp and their stories and memories of the Second World War and its aftermath continue to permeate his paintings. Themes of love, loss, identity, destiny and disappearance pervade his work. And yet Vanriet says: "The starting point may be my family, but I see it as a universal story. I don't want the themes to be too narrow, too close to me, because they should go wider than that. If not, it is only anecdote and I have not painted well enough."
, Thames & Hudson, 2006 Hardcover, 192 pages, ENG., 280 x 240 x 25 mm, As Good As New !,illustrated dustjacket, with images / illustrations in colors. ISBN 9780500238332.
A survey of figure painting's renaissance in the modern art world. This work introduces over 85 of the international artists who place painting and the figure at the heart of their practice, and puts their work and the themes they explore in historical, social and artistic context. It includes a history of the genre and biographies.
, Lannoo, 2015 Gebonden, Hardcover 224 pagina's, geillustreerd, 26cm x 30cm. ISBN 9789401424165.
Jan Vanriet is a Belgian painter and poet. A pivotal figure in the narrative painting movement born in 1948 in Antwerp. Vanriet has represented Belgium at the Sao Paulo, Venice and Seoul biennials, and has exhibited internationally in art museums and reputed galleries. He has completed monumental mural commissions at public and corporate sites. Distinguished art historians and authors have contributed to the numerous publications on Vanriet's work, which is in many important private and public collections throughout the world. This book is a comprehensive survey of Vanriet's work from 2012 to 2014. Thematic and stylistic breath, as well as an important body of a lifetime's work, demonstrate that he is an artist on a grand scale, one who incessantly dares to reinvent himself.