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Hans Op de BeeckVanishing Point
Working in a wide variety of media and forms, Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck (b. 1969) has forged his own path over the years, developing a protean body of work encompassing immersive installations and sculptures, video works, texts and drawings, photography, and watercolour paintings. Additionally, Op de Beeck has been working in the theatre, opera and contemporary dance world as a playwright, scenographer, stage director and costume designer.
Hans Op de Beeck is most known for his monumental, immersive, sensorial installations: enigmatic fictitious scenes frozen in time which visitors can enter, sparking silent contemplation as well as moments of wonder. His distinctive body of work explores the complex, tragicomic relationship between humans and the world, as well as the universal questions touching on the meaning of life.
With Vanishing Point, the artist’s solo exhibition at The Nordic Watercolour Museum, Op de Beeck will present a large collection of more than twenty black-and-white watercolour paintings and a collection of recent sculptures, including his acclaimed monumental work Danse Macabre (2021) – a baroque, life-size monochrome sculpture of a merry-go-round, both absurdly and festively reflecting on mortality.
About the sculpture
Danse Macabre (2021)
The classic carousel is usually a brightly coloured, kitsch object that nostalgically refers to the times of yesteryear’s fairgrounds. Hans Op de Beeck considers the merry-go-round as a tragicomic staging of entertainment. There is something rather absurd about the aimless circling around a meaningless centre point. The title "Danse Macabre" alludes to a classical motif throughout the history of art, a motif that is a figurative representation of death, which was particularly popular during the Middle Ages. The merry-go-round serves as a monumental still life, a reminder of the ephemerality, transience, and relativity in our lives. The sculpture is one of the many works by Op de Beeck that will be presented during the summer's exhibition at The Nordic Watercolour Museum.
Since 2009, Op de Beeck, in between the sculptural projects, films and performing arts projects, has been working on a steadily growing body of large black-and-white watercolours. In these works on paper, he shows us enigmatic fictional places, such as gloomy metropolitan settings, alienating natural landscapes and suggestive interiors. Since the artist often paints the watercolours at night, the night-time often creeps into these images.
The watercolours form the backdrop to the new animated film Vanishing Point. The term, which also is the title of the exhibition, refers to a point in the picture plane of a perspective view where mutually parallel lines seem to converge. Op de Beeck uses the term metaphorically, as a tipping point from which we shift from measurability and legibility into the unknown, indecipherable, and incomprehensible, or from the concrete to the abstract, mental or spiritual. The film starts with the image of a little boy resting peacefully on his back with his eyes closed. Next, we are transported to fictional landscapes, still lifes and figures, musically accompanied by a specially created composition by composer-musician Sam Vloemans, performed by the Hermes Ensemble.