For almost three decades, Van den Broek has traveled extensively, capturing location-specific scenes through photography and translating them into paintings. His work has long explored road culture, movement, and the aesthetics of the built environment, depicting highways and urban landscapes. In 2023, he reoriented his approach, treating the canvas itself as a road. Using materials typically reserved for street markings, such as road paint and tar, he applies color in precise bands and lines, integrating both the physical and aesthetic language of infrastructure into his work. This shift merges and redefines the two surfaces that have shaped his paintings: the road and the canvas.
Sharp Space, 2025 | Oil and traffic paint on linen | 80 x 120 cm
Gravity
Galerie Ron Mandos is proud to present Gravity, a solo exhibition by Koen van den Broek. The exhibition showcases new paintings and sculptures, reflecting a transformation in his approach to materials and image-making. Gravity runs from March 23 to May 11, 2025.
Employing small, commercial machines designed for manual paint application, van den Broek creates precise lines and steady bands of color, often whites, yellows, and reds; reminding of Jackson Pollock’s floor-based work from the 1940s. Tar and bitumen add structure, shape, and volume to his compositions, developing his engagement with materiality. His new canvases function as landscapes of their own, where road codes are reimagined as autonomous aesthetic forms, blurring the line between representation and abstraction.
Shade Palm, 2025 | 60 x 40 cm | Oil, tar and traffic paint on linen
Koen van den Broek
Shade Yellow, 2025 | Oil, tar and traffic paint on linen | 40 x 60 cm
Koen van den Broek
Spring Side, 2025 | Oil, tar and traffic paint on linen | 88 x 115 cm
Koen van den Broek
Shade Structure, 2025 | Oil, tar and traffic paint on linen | 40 x 60 cm
Koen van den Broek
Above, the paintings Shade Palm, Shade Yellow, Spring Side, and Shade Structure belong to a series in which van den Broek repurposes shadows from earlier paintings as new compositions. He explains that he extracted a shadow from a 2003 painting and used it to create fresh works, treating shadows as autonomous forms rather than representations of objects. This approach aligns with his broader interest in capturing overlooked elements of urban landscapes, where shadows define space and structure.
Sunny Side Up uses bold, vibrant colors that are often seen in American pop culture and landscape art. The title is a playful nod to both the painting’s bright color scheme and the look of a fried egg. Many artists have used eggs in their work, especially Martin Kippenberger, who liked to mix humor and irony in his paintings. The piece captures the high-contrast, artificial colors of American cities, highlighting how roads, signs, and commercial graphics shape public spaces.
Sunny Side Up, 2025 | Oil and traffic paint on linen | 150 x 100 cm
Koen van den Broek
Installation view, “What’s The Story”, KMSKA, Antwerp © The Fresh Light
Installation view, “What’s The Story”, KMSKA, Antwerp © The Fresh Light
For the first time in his career, van den Broek introduces bronze sculptures, works that echo the styles of De Kooning, Newman, and Giacometti while maintaining an unique connection to exploration and movement. These sculptures originated from digital iPhone stickers, created from photographs of his new works, including the Firminy series and the monumental Grand Firminy, exhibited at KMSKA (Royal Museum for Fine Arts in Antwerp) during the group exhibition What’s the Story? in 2024. From these digital sketches, he developed three-dimensional forms that were then cast in bronze.
Sculpture II (Corbusier-Lucifer), 2025 | Bronze and oil paint | 113,5 x 41 x 85 cm
Koen van den Broek
Van den Broek paints these bronzes with oil, a material he had previously set aside. While oil paint was once central to his practice, it now functions as an element within a broader material vocabulary that includes tar, bronze, and road paint. On canvas, he reintroduces oil in combination with these materials, on the intersection of different mediums.
The exhibition’s title, Gravity, speaks to both the weight and verticality of the sculptures and to Van den Broek’s working process. His canvases are placed on the ground, allowing tar and spray paint to be applied horizontally. Gravity becomes an active force, influencing the movement and layering of materials. On a broader level, Gravity prompts attraction–between materials, forms, and artistic processes. It also alludes to a sense of nostalgia, a pull toward the past that is present in his road imagery, where places and memories intertwine through layers of paint.
Sculpture I (self-portrait in blue), 2025 | Bronze and oil paint | 187,5 x 85 x 65 cm
Koen van den Broek
Sculpture III (lost letter), 2025 | Bronze and oil paint | 23 x 122 x 7,5 cm
Koen van den Broek
With Gravity, van den Broek redefines his relationship with the road, painting, and sculpture, integrating industrial materials and new techniques while continuing his engagement with urban spaces, movement, and his ever-curious perspective.
About the artist
Koen van den Broek (b. 1973, Bree, Belgium) lives and works in Antwerp. Trained as an architect before studying painting at the Royal Academy of Antwerp and the Academy of Visual Arts in Breda, his work has consistently examined the built environment, focusing on roads, curbs, and architectural fragments.
Van den Broek’s paintings are included in the collections of LACMA, Los Angeles; SMAK, Ghent; M HKA, Antwerp; Busan Museum of Art; and SFMOMA, San Francisco. His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2015 & 2017), White Cube, London; Kunstmuseum, Bonn; the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp; and the Kunsthal, Rotterdam.
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