Hans Op de Beeck at Boghossian Foundation
Hans Op de Beeck is part of the group show Family Matters at The Boghossian Foundation in Brussels. The exhibition presents a narrative built on a dialogue between artworks that successively broach the themes of childhood, the couple, parents and grandparents, brotherhood, sisterhood, sexuality, and intergenerational transmission. Through a series of videos, installations, sculptures, paintings and drawings, Family Matters will take visitors on a journey of personal and group experiences on the topic of the family.
Following the footsteps of the many writers who devoted their writings to portraying their families, the artists presented in this exhibition give a central place to their family circle in their own oeuvre. Indeed, some produce their artworks with their own relatives. Some of the artworks draw on childhood memories and loving feelings, while others summon up domestic violence, capturing or re-enacting intimate situations or family tensions.
The video All Together Now… shows three meals, three distinct rituals, held in three different social contexts. The events staged by the artist – a wedding, an anniversary, and a funeral – represent the familial and shared occasions running through the fabric of contemporary society, notwithstanding class or age divides. The fluid movement of the camera, the unintelligible soundscape, and the artificial light provide a clear barrier between the viewer and the other guests, life becomes a panorama.
Featured artwork:
Hans Op de Beeck
All Together Now…, 2005
Video, 6’20” Looped, Colour, Sound, Life-sized Video
Courtesy: Goetz Collection – Munich, Fonds national d’art contemporain – Paris and Private Collections
Practical information:
Family Matters
On view through 28 May 2023
Boghossian Foundation, Brussels
ABOUT Hans Op de Beeck
Hans Op de Beeck was born in 1969 in Turnhout, Belgium. He lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
Hans Op de Beeck produces large installations, sculptures, films, drawings, paintings, photographs and texts. 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.
Over the past twenty years Op de Beeck realized numerous monumental ‘sensorial’ installations, in which he evoked what he describes as ‘visual fictions’: tactile deserted spaces as an empty set for the viewer to walk through or sit down in, sculpted havens for introspection. In many of his films though, in contrast with those depopulated spaces, he prominently depicts anonymous characters.
Hans Op de Beeck was born in Turnhout in 1969. He lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Op de Beeck has shown his work extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world.
