Never Finished

Dirk Bours’ paintings originate from his many forays through the urban landscape. Inspired by cities such as Bucharest, Vienna, Istanbul, London, Berlin, Madrid, Helsinki, and New York, he explored the structure of the contemporary city itself by capturing its form and composition, rhythm and materiality. Bours extracted fragments from photographs of street scenes, buildings, and industrial zones to transform them into paintings that exist between abstraction and figuration. At first glance, his work appears as an abstract arrangement of colors and geometry. On closer inspection, embedded elements emerge, for instance the hoods above traffic lights, revealing a sense of spatial depth.

Bours’ visual language evolved from experiences as a graffiti artist, through photography and graphic design, still visible in traces of sharp lines, bold signs, and architectural structures. His painting process mirrored the city itself as an organic cycle of construction and deconstruction. He repeatedly built up, broke down, and reworked layers of paint, with each layer guiding the next. Like a city, his paintings were never fully planned nor definitively finished, constantly changing, shaped by accumulation and loss.

Rather than depicting the specific places he visited, his works resist fixed reference points, proposing instead a visual abstraction of the ongoing transformation of urban life. His paintings remain open, inviting the viewer to trace his decisions and revisions that structure their surfaces, preserving what a city erases.