Hans Op de Beeck

The artist not only uses a very wide variety of media, but also deliberately employs a diversity of aesthetic forms, ranging from an economical, minimalist visual language to overloaded, exaggerated designs, always with the aim of articulating the content of the work as precisely as possible.

(Hans Op de Beeck in an interview with Marc Holthof from H ART)Thematically, the work concentrates on our laborious and problematic relationship with time, space and each other.

Op de Beeck shows the viewer non-existent, but identifiable places, moments and characters that appear to have been taken from contemporary everyday life, aiming thereby to capture in his images the tragicomic absurdity of our postmodern existence.

Key themes are the disappearance of distances, the disembodiment of the individual and the abstraction of time that have resulted from globalisation and the changes to our living environment that developments in media, automation and technology have brought about.

The soft, grey plaster of which the work is constructed seems to abstract the attractions in dark stone, like a kind of contemporary Pompei, covered with the dust of the layered, silent time.

In 2009, the artist presented a new video entitled Staging Silence, in which two pairs of anonymous hands continually transform a world on scale into a new image in front of the spectator's eyes.