SOFACQ Gallery

Hans Op de Beeck (Turnhout, 1969) is a Belgian visual artist who lives and works in Anderlecht (Brussels). He has been building an international exhibition trail for the past twenty years. He studied Liberal Arts at the Sint-Lukas Art School in Brussels. Afterwards he studied for a further year at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts (HISK, then in Antwerp, today in Ghent), and then two years at the Rijksakademie (Amsterdam).

 

Multi-disciplinary visual artist Hans Op de Beeck creates sculptures, monumental installations, drawings, watercolors, photos, art videos, animated films, films, music and texts. He often shows us fictional, contemporary-looking locations, situations and environments that the spectator may be familiar with.

 

The search for visualizing the concrete content of an image as adequately as possible determines the medium for which the artist ultimately chooses. The scale can vary from a small watercolor to a large, spatial installation of 600m2. However, the artist not only uses a wide variety of media, but also consciously uses a wide variety of aesthetics, ranging from a sparse, minimalist visual language to an overloaded Mannerist design, each time in function of articulating the content as accurately as possible.

 

Thematically, the work focuses on our laborious and problematic handling of time, space and each other. Hans Op de Beeck shows the viewer non-existent, but recognizable places, moments and extras that seem to have been removed from the current daily life and tries to capture the tragicomic absurdity of this postmodern existence in images.

 

Hans Op de Beeck sometimes calls his images 'proposals'; they are undeniably fictional, constructed and staged, leaving the viewer the choice to take the image seriously, as a kind of parallel reality, or to put it into perspective immediately, as nothing more than a visual construction. The work is fueled by a great interest in social and cultural-historical reflection.

 

The artist also questions the difficult relationship between reality and representation, between what we see and what we want to believe, what is and what we create for ourselves in order to soften the relationship with our own relativity and interchangeability. The visual output of that research often yields dormant, insidious, melancholy or alienating images.