Frans Peeters

'Spherical sculpture with saddle' 1968

The Limburg artist Frans Peeters (1925), who calls himself a builder of sculptures rather than a sculptor, has gained world fame with his polyester sculptures. Thus, in 1970 one of his bent shapes decorates the Dutch pavilion at the world exhibition in Osaka. And the VPRO broadcasting corporation makes the film 'The round world of Frans Peeters' about his work.

This clarifies the essence of his work, although he did make numerous variations of this primeval form. His first sculptures were small, showing coiled figures, vegetable fruit and bud shapes and female nudes. The big breakthrough comes with his polyester spherical shapes. The predilection for this he phrases as follows in an interview: "The spherical shape is the perfection of spatial experience. When I stand in front of a globe, I am frontally facing a plane that bends away from me in all directions, until it disappears from view. I suspect that its bending continues, I experience the other side. I am on all sides at once and opposite myself, as it were."

About his choice of polyester Peeters says: "I want to make sculptures whose material does not tell you anything about its maker. That feeling emerged with my marble sculptures. People admired the polished, milky, transparent skin, whereas I think that the sculpture must tell its own story. Therefore the sculpture must be stripped from the traces of having been worked. Then the maker is where he belongs: outside the picture."

Still, he has not got there entirely by using polyester, for what color must the sculpture get? Black gives the globes a certain weight that Peeters does not want. When pure white, the spherical shape appears to be dominant, so he chooses off-white.

Sculptures

Frans Peeters