
About the artist
b. 1973 in Bree, Belgium
Lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium
In his painterly exploration of urban details such a cracks on the road, Belgian painter Koen van den Broek develops an ambiguous kind of representation. Looking down at the asphalt and often using photographs as references, his paintings operate by zooming in on their subjects, eventually leading the painter towards abstraction. His work shows traces of human presence: circus tents, highways, bridges, sewers, pipes, fragments of houses or cars. The artist seeks out anonymity, the general rather than the specific. This relationship vis-à-vis photography is essential to his work. Playfulness, diversity and duality – rigid delineation versus wild brush strokes, depth versus surface – are all characteristic of his work. Koen Van den Broek questions the viewing schemes of photography. His paintings are anti-images, reactions against the recordings of the camera.
Exhibitions


Koen van den Broek
Track
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.
Editors: Philipp von Rosen
Release Date: September 2014
Format: 21 x 28 cm
Features: 106 pages, approx. 70 color images, hardcover
Product details: Published by Distanz
Language: English