Hans Op de Beeck

The oeuvre of Hans Op de Beeck gathers a variety of sculptures, of installation and video work,
photography, animation film, drawings, paintings and short stories. His aesthetics is deliberately
ambiguous and non-univocal: minimalist creations combine with their blown-up opposites, always aiming to articulate the content of the work as precise as possible.

Thematically, the work of Hans Op de Beeck is concerned with the difficult relationship man has with time and space and with his fellow man. His images show non-existent yet identifiable places, moments and characters that appear to be taken from everyday life and capture the tragicomic absurdity of postmodern existence. Key to his oeuvre are the abstraction of time, the fading of distance and the disembodiment of the individual – results of globalisation. Also under discussion are the changes brought to our living environment by developments in media, automation and technology.

Hans Op de Beeck has been referring to his work with the name 'proposals': he leaves it to the viewer to decide whether to take the work, – which is irrefutably fictional, constructed and staged – serious as some parallel reality or to immediately put it into perspective as no more than a visual construct. This relationship between reality and representation, between what we see and what we want to believe, between what is and what we create for ourselves in order to make it easier to deal with our own insignificance and lack of identity, is of great importance. The output is a series of slumbering, insidious, melancholy and astonishing images.