Artist Database

Clement Serneels was born to a Spanish mother and a Flemish father in 1912. He attended the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Belgium. In 1936, he was awarded a government scholarship to spend a year painting in the former Belgian Congo. Upon his return to Brussels, he held an incredibly successful exhibition of these works. He used the profit from this to return to Africa, settling in Costermansstad (present-day Bukavu) in the Belgian Congo during World War II. Serneels moved to South Africa in 1945 but returned to live on Lake Kivu in 1953. 1960 saw the end of colonial rule in the country and this prompted Serneels to move back to Belgium, where he stayed until his death in 1991. The artist participated in several exhibitions throughout his career in South Africa and Belgium and also in Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere in Europe. Serneels was a post-Impressionist painter of portraits, landscapes, and still lifes.