(b St Niklaas, 23 July 1920). Belgian painter, art historian and teacher. He studied history and art history at the Rijksuniversiteit, Ghent (1938–42), subsequently becoming a curator until 1960 at the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, where he became the main specialist in the works of Ensor. From 1957 to 1986 he was a teacher and then a senior professor at the Rijksuniversiteit, Ghent. As a painter he was self-taught; his work was first exhibited in 1964 at the Galerie Ardetti in Paris and Galleria Ciranna, Milan, and until 1971 it was three-dimensional and dominated by the human figure. His series Lives of the 12 Caesars (after Suetonius) are assemblages of waste material (e.g. The Fallen Emperor, 1964; Brussels, Mus. A. Mod.). The Death and Apotheosis of a Pope series are polystyrene reliefs. He then experimented with terracotta. In 1967–8 he made ‘picto-reliefs’, such as Paradise Lost, which evokes a joyous profusion of plant life. His most striking official and public success came from 1971, when he became recognized as the most important Belgian hyperrealist painter. This phase ended c. 1978 with a series of monumental fragments of Fairground Buildings, in which he dealt directly with the problem of trompe l’oeil and the autonomy of abstract colouristic structures. In the 1980s he resumed a freer handling of materials associated with experiments in encaustic and in oils. These series include Bouquet, which chronicles the decay of flowers, as well as Landscapes and Skies (e.g. Sky, 1985; priv. col., see 1986 exh. cat., p. 71).