Paul-Henri Bourguignon Gallery Paul-Henri Bourguignon studied painting at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and Art History at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Bourguignon’s insatiable curiosity about the people and customs of far-away places led him on a series of extensive travels to Spain, Corsica, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, North Africa, the Caribbean, and Peru. In 1950, Bourguignon settled in Columbus, Ohio with his wife, an anthropology professor at the Ohio State University. From that period until his death in 1988, Bourguignon was a prolific painter, recalling with vivid intensity scenes from his travels and his impressions of the people he encountered. As the art critic for the Brussels newspaper Le Phare in the 1940’s, Bourguignon was active in the Belgian art scene, writing about established artists exhibiting in Belgium and France. Influenced by Cezanne, Dufy, and Matisse, Bourguignon noted that he too strove for transposition in his paintings. He developed a style that was distinct from his European contemporaries, imbuing his work with the richness of his own personal experiences and his love of the “primitive” art of Haiti and Peru. Bourguignon worked with gouache and favored a more pronounced subject matter in his early paintings, and later moved to the use of acrylics and collage. His painting style became increasingly abstracted in his late works, but never abandons subject matter entirely. The work is left open to multiple perspectives and interpretations, challenging the acuteness of the viewer’s eye. In all Bourguignon’s work, figures and landscapes are full of movement, brought to life with subtle delineation of color and spontaneous brushwork.