Jan Yoors

Working directly with the Estate of Jan Yoors, Dropshop is honored to present a curated selection of the artist’s original charcoal drawings, vibrant gouache studies for monumental tapestries, and a hand-woven Aubusson tapestry. Working fluidly across mediums throughout his decades-long career, Yoors developed a distinct methodology within each practice while remaining deeply experimental. His mastery of traditional materials, combined with influences drawn from his cultural surroundings and imagination, allowed him to continuously evolve his visual language.

The abstracted tapestry works were inspired by everyday observations: photographs, magazine clippings, shadows cast by plants, weathered posters, and forms from the natural world. Yoors would begin by framing and refining compositions through gouaches, sketches, tracings, and collages before arriving at a final image. Gouache studies established the color palette for each tapestry, after which the composition was traced, gridded, and enlarged for transfer to the loom. Full-scale painted cartoons were often suspended behind the warp during weaving, while the warp threads themselves were painted to indicate shifts in color. An eight-by-ten-foot tapestry typically required four to five months to complete, with teams of three or four weavers working daily on Yoors’ handmade fifteen-foot loom. Each tapestry remained unique, woven only once, as Yoors approached tapestry-making with the same experimental spirit as painting.

The charcoal drawings presented on Dropshop date from 1975 and come from a series Yoors began in the late 1940s and revisited throughout his career. Executed on thick tan paper, the works move between loose sketch and bold definition. Depicting fragmented or profile studies of the female figure, the drawings reduce form to powerful contours and abstracted volumes. Across the series, outlines grow increasingly pronounced while recognizable anatomy dissolves into shape and rhythm, revealing the artist’s enduring focus on line, structure, and abstraction.

A selection of Yoors’ charcoal drawings, gouaches, and tapestry works are currently on view at Delen Private Bank in Antwerp. This fall, his work will also be featured in a solo exhibition at Gallery FIFTY ONE Fine Arts. Major museum exhibitions include a 1979 memorial exhibition following Yoors' death at MoMA PS1 in New York and a 2012 retrospective at the Felix Art & Eco Museum in Belgium.