Roger David Servais - UNTITLED 1993 signed

Mixed media, tempera and acrylic on handmade laid paper. 70 x 65 cm. Signed and dated 1993 in pencil lower right. From the estate of the gallery owner and collector Jürgen Schweinebraden. Roger David Servais, born in 1942 in Liège, Belgium, is a Belgian painter, draughtsman, sculptor, and designer. Raised in Liège, Brussels, and Berlin, he began studying painting and design at the Berlin University of the Arts (West) in 1961. When the Soviet sector of the city was sealed off by the Berlin Wall, he married his girlfriend Waltraud Kolbow from the eastern part of the city and subsequently lived with her in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. Their daughter Marguerite was born in 1965. As a Belgian citizen, he was still able to travel freely, commuting between Brussels and Berlin, but was subjected to reprisals in East Germany. As an artist, he was effectively banned from exhibiting there. He designed book covers for various publishers. Through the mediation of the King of the Belgians, Baudouin, his wife and daughter were only able to leave East Germany and emigrate to Belgium in 1973. At the Berlin University of the Arts, Roger David Servais resumed his art studies in 1974, which had been forcibly interrupted in 1963. His most important teacher was the Bauhaus student Otto Hofmann. In 1979, he was accepted into the German Artists' Association. In the 1980s, Roger David Servais worked for extended periods in Belgium, France, Israel, New York, Sweden, and Italy. From 1990 onward, he collaborated with the painter and civil rights activist Bärbel Bohley to raise awareness about the suppression and instrumentalization of art in East Germany. Together, they initiated the publication "Imprisoned – Excluded: Fine Arts and Party Rule in the GDR 1961–1989," edited by Klaus Schröder and Hannelore Offner and published in 2000 by the Berlin Academy Publishing House. After the death of his first wife, he married Tosca Schmalenberg in 1998. Roger David Servais is a member of the German Artists' Association. He lives and works in Berlin and in the South of France. Roger David Servais is considered a "European nonconformist." He is a figurative artist, painter, draftsman, sculptor, and designer who combines quite contrasting artistic approaches in his work – geometric abstraction as well as modes of expression from Symbolism and Surrealism. His paintings and drawings contain complex religious, historical, autobiographical, or social statements that are conveyed indirectly, subtly, and sometimes in coded form. Individual letters play a special role, suggesting rather than explicitly stating connections; colors are also integrated into the image's message. The relationship between form and surface is of great importance.