Panorama

Mixed media
Dimensions: 120 x 120 x 200cm
Series of 7

Hans OP DE BEECK

For this first collaboration the artist proposed a white desk with a view.
‘Panorama’ combines a monochrome white desk for one person with a rocky landscape, stripped of colour and anecdotal elements, and sculpted from memory and imagination, to become an archetypal, serene place. As such, the piece echoes the themes of stillness and solitude found in the sculptural
installation ‘Location (6)’, which the artist presented at the HollandFestival (2008) and the Singapore Biennale (2009), among other venues.

ABOUT

Born 1969 in Turnhout
Lives and works in Brussels

Hans Op de Beeck’s work consists of sculptures, installations, video work, photography, animated films,
drawings, paintings and text (short stories). His quest for the most effective way of presenting the concrete
contents of an image determines the medium the artist finally settles on.
The scale can vary from a small watercolour to a large three-dimensional installation.
The artist deliberately uses a wide variety of aesthetic forms, from a frugal, minimalistic visual language to overloaded exaggerated designs, always with the aim of articulating the content in the most effective way.
Thematically, the work focuses on our laborious and problematic relationship with time, space and each
other. Op de Beeck shows the viewer non-existent but recognisable places, moments and figures that seem to be taken from actual everyday life and he uses them to try and capture the tragicomic absurdity of our postmodern existence in his images.
He sometimes calls his images ‘proposals'; they are undeniably fictitious, constructed and staged, and the viewer is left to decide whether to take the image seriously, as a sort of parallel reality, or to immediately
put them into perspective, as nothing more than a visual construction. The work is fuelled by a great interest in reflection on society and cultural history.
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 make it easier for us to deal with our own relativity and exchangeability.
The visual output of this research often produces drowsy, treacherous, melancholy or surprising images.