Hans Op De Beeck
Vanishing Point
The Nordic Watercolour Museum dedicates a solo show to Hans Op de Beeck presenting a large collection of more than twenty black-and-white watercolour paintings and a collection of recent sculptures alongside an animated film.
From May 26 to September 22, 2024
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.
The Boatman
The artist
Born in 1969, Hans Op de Beek lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. He produces large installations, sculptures, films, drawings, paintings, photographs and texts. Over the past twenty years Op de Beeck realised numerous monumental ‘sensorial’ installations: tactile deserted spaces as an empty set for the viewer to walk through or sit down in, sculpted havens for introspection. His work is a reflection on our complex society and the universal questions of meaning and mortality that resonate within it. He regards man as a being who stages the world around him in a tragi-comic way. Above all, Op de Beeck is keen to stimulate the viewers’ senses, and invite them to really experience the image. He seeks to create a form of visual fiction that delivers a moment of wonder and silence.
