Gilbert Swimberghe joined the leading Bruges artist and writer collective ‘Raaklijn’ in 1957. Since the 1950s, triangles and squares dominated Swimberghe’s abstracts, but his use of color underwent a continuous evolution since then. The warm suggestive colors of expressionism gave way to shades of white in order to achieve a higher abstraction. In the period 1975-1980 he mainly painted in gray tones. From the 1980s, Swimberghe allowed a degree of imperfections in his paintings, and replaced the very smooth paint treatment with a style that left traces of the painting process in texture and paint. Later his color palette evolved from gray to gray-blue to deep blue.
