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Biography

Raphaëlle Goethals creates enigmatic abstractions utilizing a highly refined mix of hot and cold encaustic techniques uniquely her own. For nearly three decades, she has established her own vocabulary in the form of distinctive groups of works, which evolved concurrently. Goethals is interested in the blurring of boundaries. At the intersection of the minimal and the expressive, her sensuous surfaces dive into the evolution of consciousness. Drawing from minimalist practice, her surfaces are built slowly over time, like strata on the earth.

Her work resists classification, it neither explains nor denies any representation yet strongly evokes the natural forces and atmospheric elements. The all-encompassing, physical, repetitive, and labor-intensive practice is seen in remnants that saturate the work with an undeniable aura, stripped of any unnecessary additions. The internalized landscape becomes a celebration of flux, memory, and the passage of time.

Raphaëlle Goethals (b.1958 in Brussels, Belgium) graduated from L’école Le75 and moved to Los Angeles in 1981 to further her formal education at the Otis Art Institute. Attracted to the vastness of the landscape and the quality of light, she relocated to New Mexico in 1994 where she developed her mature painting style. Throughout her career she has continued to exhibit in Santa Fe, New York, San Francisco, and Dallas. She is represented in numerous private and public collections including the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Missouri, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona, the New Mexico Museum of Fine Art, Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona, Boise Art Museum, Idaho, and The Grace Museum, Texas.