Fall of Phaëton Painting

Ton Bartels is a Dutch artist. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, where he graduated in 1978. He lives and works in Houten, Netherlands. Characteristic are his artistic reconfigurations of well-known iconic images from Greek mythology with forays into other art history subjects. Ton Bartels’ posthistorical work carefully examines the linearity of the historical perspective embedded in our visual understanding of the past. Alternately described as both ‘an unfettered spirit turned artist’ and ‘a contemporary iconoclastic’, his art takes a space beyond our traditional understanding of history to become a bridge between different eras and its new form of visual language. Bartels’ hybrid aesthetic is challenging. He uses a high level of craftsmanship that is based on classical techniques in combination with a twenty-first-century view of the possibilities of image editing, in which an almost Fauvist brushwork is leading.