Raphaëlle Goethals was born and raised in Brussels, Belgium. She grew up under glazed skies and amidst the devotional works of Van Eyck and Van Der Weyden. She was exposed early to influential exhibitions in Brussels, Paris or Basel, and started painting at an early age.

 

Goethals received a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Atelier 75 in Brussels in 1980; and came to Los Angeles in 1981 to further her education at the Otis Art Institute.  

 

Attracted to the vastness of the landscape and the quality of light, she relocated to New Mexico in the mid nineties where she developed her mature painting style.

 

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

 

Morphing the expressive and the minimal, her highly emotive and refined encaustic paintings have been widely exhibited, and featured in Art Forum, Art in America, THE, Luxe, Architectural Digest, and many regional publications. 

 

Her work is held in numerous selective private and corporate collections.