"In this exhibition Hans Op de Beeck wants to evoke a kind of total experience by employing an unusual mix of anachronistic visual and sound works. Melancholic landscapes mix with strange noises, music and wandering lost characters."
The gallery welcomes the first solo exhibition of the Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck in France. This young and talented artist, already recognized in Belgium, has recently seen his work crowned by many exhibitions. In 2003, he won the Prix Jeune Peinture, which recognizes young Belgian artists, and his work was shown at the GEM in The Hague this spring, at Art Unlimited in Basel last June, and in numerous group exhibitions as well as in the personal exhibitions that the four galleries representing him around the world have devoted to him this year.
Such a fast success can undoubtedly be explained by the originality and density of his work, which is expressed through different media: drawings, photographs, films, sculptures and models of imaginary situations that can go as far as the gigantic (for the GEM exhibition and his participation in Basel, he created Location 5, a trompe l'oeil of a 24-meter long highway rest area, and for the Young Artists' Award, Location 4, a model of a neighborhood that can reach 10 meters by 10 meters. In general, it is a set of different means of expression that support a subject, such as: My Brother's Gardens (2003) which is a film but also a set of works for which the artist has created an imaginary garden from numerous drawings that he has assembled in an animated film where each image merges with the next. This film was later integrated into a cinematography developed as a nostalgic story in homage to the "brother". At the same time, the artist has extended his proposal by sculptures from the drawings, which are of course shown at the same time.