KU Leuven: Sam Dillemans donated two of his famous war landscapes to KU Leuven
Sam Dillemans remains inspired by the First World War. On November 11, he donated two works, which were part of the exhibition Goodbye to all that – Paintings of the Great War , to the University Library of KU Leuven. Dillemans, who was born in Leuven, also wants to use this donation to commemorate the catastrophic fire that hit the library in August 1914 and destroyed a significant part of the collection.
East Yorkshires and Remains of the Menin Road , the two works that Sam Dillemans donates to the university library, depict the horrors of the First World War, but he says they are not an indictment: ‘We have had charges. They are yet another finding. A literal black and white assessment of the age-old war horrors of man and animal in general, and of the soldier and horse in particular. It has become an intimate observation, of abandonment, pain and farewell.’
On 11 November, Luc Sels, rector of KU Leuven, and Hilde Van Kiel, director of KU Leuven Libraries, officially received the works.
“Unfortunately, the horror of war remains all too current. That too is a finding. The fate of Leuven and our library during the First World War can be seen elsewhere in Europe today. The works that Sam Dillemans gives us could be scenes that take place in the Donbas today. We must not forget our history, and must continue to tell our story. East Yorkshires and Remains of the Menin Road will help us with that.”
Rector Luc Sels
“The works will have a permanent place in our University Library and will be included in the audio-guided route that visitors follow. They thus become an extra topical occasion to convey the story of the Great War and the fate of our library to a wide audience,” says director Hilde van Kiel.
Both paintings were part of the exhibition Goodbye to all that – Paintings of the Great War , which took place in 2018 in the Sam Dillemans Exhibition Room. Piet Chielens, former director of the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, expressed Dillemans’ fascination for the Great War in this way: ‘The war was waiting inside the painter until he would let it out. The result of a lifelong fascination for the extreme in man, and years of reading.’
Since 2016, Sam Dillemans has been exhibiting in his own exhibition space in Antwerp. After a retrospective exhibition and an expo focusing on war landscapes ( Goodbye to All That – Paintings of the Great War ), Dillemans exhibited his acclaimed boxers from October 2019 to spring 2020 under the name FIGHTERS. In the autumn of 2023, he will open a new exhibition with landscapes as a common thread.