Track documents recent paintings by Koen van den Broek and represents an evolution of style for one of the most accomplished painters of his generation. The book follows a sequence of exhibitions that he has made over the past two years, which mark a significant turning point and development in the artis’s practice, as he pushes all remaining figurative elements towards the field of complete abstraction. He is widely celebrated for his series of paintings inspired by unconventional perspective. On road journeys in the United States, he took hundreds of snapshots that he could later use as source material for his canvases where he would focus on one detail. These details might include a section of the road, the curb receding into the perspective of the image, or cracks in the surface, and almost always an interplay with shadows; a displaced tradition of the Flemish landscape. Today he reworks recurring features in his previous paintings, a vocabulary that continues to recombine into new compositions.

In Out of Place, noted LA-based art historian John C. Welchman offers a tour-de-force discussion of the first 25 years of Koen van den Broek’s work. The book is partly chronological, partly attentive to the genres, styles, media and concepts around which the artist has innovated, from painting to public space. Welchman unpacks a wide spectrum of references and allusions—to Mondrian, Malevich, Matisse, Rothko and many other modernist artists; to postwar photographies; to the art cinemas of the 1960s and ’70s; and to the history of freeways, interstates and the evolution of the singular urban fabrics of the United States. He offers exciting new accounts of the defining orientation of the first decade of van den Broek’s painting as it entered into pathbreaking pictorial dialogues with borders, shadows and cracks. The second part of the monograph takes up with a frankly surprising range of ideas and issues connected to figures, identities, landscape, ecology, appropriation, opera, and institutions … and to the striking material appurtenances of Formula 1 racing.

Landscapes and urban views poised between abstraction and representation The paintings of Koen van den Broek (*1973 in Bree) draw attention with their genuine, unique perspectives and range of perceptual possibilities. The artist wanders the surface of the world, finding visual inspiration on the peripheries of the city, on insignificant façades, empty highways, closed garages, lofty viaduct pillars, and desolate curbsides. Using his own photographic diaries of trips throughout America, Asia, and Europe as source material, van den Broek turns layered visual experience into compelling oil paintings on canvas. The compositions are vaguely familiar, but brushstroke and paint texture re-create, re-imagine and invent new realities. This publication presents the conflation of two exemplary projects: a monumentally-scaled series of paintings from the Insomnia cycle, painted in Antwerp, and a smaller, intimately nuanced group of paintings of the Greenhouse, created by the artist during a residency in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.