Focusing on Painting as a space of exploration, Belgian born, American artist Raphaëlle Goethals has worked in encaustic as her signature medium for nearly two decades. After receiving a Bachelor of Art with honors from the Ecole Atelier 75 in Brussels, Goethals came to the United States in 1981 to further her education at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA. Attracted to the vastness of the landscape and the quality of light, she relocated to New Mexico in 1994 where she developed her mature painting style.

Known for her signature layered encaustic and pigment abstractions, Goethals established her own unique and sophisticated vocabulary in the form of distinctive groups of paintings, which evolve concurrently.  

Embarking on a conceptually rigorous journey, yet trusting an intuitive sense of rightness, Goethals is interested in a blurring of boundaries. While the “Lumens” series started in the late nineties alluded to semantics and the intimate relationship between body and text, in the past decade Goethals began to focus on an increasingly distilled process, emptying her subtle surfaces from anything narrative, descriptive, or anecdotal. Morphing the expressive and the minimal, her signature surfaces have turned increasingly rich and psychologically compelling. The work may be seen as referring to minimalism and the fundamentality of Light and Space, yet reformulate the “question of Painting” in the classical sense. The surface itself, the planes, the tones, the light as well as the grid system state their importance. The work unapologically aims to reach a deep level of Beauty and emotional resonance.

Goethals’s work is represented in numerous private and corporate collections in the United States and Europe, and has been exhibited in international art fairs in Miami, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco. Her work is in permanent collections including the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the New Mexico Museum of Fine Art, the Boise Art Museum, Hewlett Packard, the Millennium group, Time Warner, Paul Allen, and numerous corporate and private collections in the United States and Europe.