A new publication reappraises Marianne Van Vyve as a powerful female artist

Mercatorfonds announces the publication of a monograph dedicated to Belgian painter Marianne Van Vyve (1943–1991), a singular voice in postwar European art.

Never affiliated to any particular group, Marianne Van Vyve mainly followed her own artistic inclination, often against the prevailing trends of the time. She chronicled her emotional landscape through her art, in the quiet of her successive studios.

This richly illustrated volume explores her intriguing work, examining the influence of her academic training on her formative years and outlining her evolution as a painter. The book not only retraces the trajectory of her multifaceted career but also brings a deeply personal dimension: the book was initiated and edited by her daughter, Delphine Cool, who has carefully pieced together her mother’s life and work.

This publication reappraises Marianne Van Vyve as a powerful female artist within a broader art-historical context — with a contribution by writer, art critic and former editor of Frieze Jennifer Higgie —, and also highlights the radical intimacy of her practice. As a result, this book sheds new light on a remarkable yet little-known artist whose oeuvre continues to resist easy categorization.

In her moving introduction, Delphine Cool reflects on the long process of returning to her mother’s work:

“Although I was twenty when she died, her sudden passing was life-changing and quietly traumatic. It would only be three decades later, with my life farther along and my own children grown up, that I could start to piece her life story together and look at her work with the necessary detachment. I wondered about her place in the artistic bohemia of Antwerp, the home town she never left."
​— Delphine Cool

Practical information

Marianne Van Vyve
​Published by Mercatorfonds

About Marianne Van Vyve

Trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Van Vyve was one of the few women represented by Galerie De Zwarte Panter, where she held her first solo exhibition in 1979. Never affiliated with a particular movement, she followed her own artistic path, often against prevailing trends, chronicling her emotional landscape in the intimacy of her studios.

Rooted in the European modernist tradition, her oeuvre resists easy categorization, spanning large figurative canvases inspired by Magritte, Courbet, Beckmann and Friedrich, to later abstract works imbued with textural experimentation and spiritual depth.

Her early work of the late 1970s revealed Van Vyve as a storyteller, with large figurative canvases featuring imposing female figures, often self-portraits, layered with symbols of motherhood, death, and psychological depth. Referencing Magritte, Courbet, Balthus, Beckmann, and Friedrich, these paintings reflected her turbulent inner life and her fascination with Jungian analysis.

In the 1980s, after her divorce, Van Vyve continued to paint while raising her daughter, Delphine, on her own. During this period she increasingly explored archetypal themes of femininity through the figures of Eve and Persephone, while moving towards abstraction and a more textural painterly language. Her final series, devoted to trees and shown at Galerie De Zwarte Panter in 1989, stands as both a meditation on nature and a testament to her interest in Native American teachings, revealing her view of painting as a healing process.

Alternating between established galleries and unconventional venues—including outdoor parking lots and abandoned industrial sites—Van Vyve’s career was cut short when she died unexpectedly in Lucca, Italy, at the age of 48.