Hans Op De Beeck

Over the past few months my recent avenue of inquiry regarding my work is Installation Art, (I know that is quite a broad term but....) more specifically, I'm interested in re-creating environments; the idea of the representation of everyday objects and the subjective reading of this by the viewer/audience. I'm interested in re-creating these environments life size so as to completely immerse the viewer into another world as such, where they not only become the observer but are also the actor within the staged set.... (I hope to elaborate on this more as my blog continues....)
But anyway, so I came across this artist the other day while researching, and he has quickly become one of my favourites: Hans Op De Beeck

Hans Op de Beeck http://www.hansopdebeeck.com/
The multi-disciplinary oeuvre of the Belgian visual artist Hans Op de Beeck (b. 1969) consists of sculptures, sculptural installations, multi-media works, videos, animation films, drawings, photographs, publications and stage designs.

Hans Op de Beeck conceives and builds contemporary fictional urban and household locations and scenes sometimes featuring human characters that viewers feel very familiar with. These include both secluded spots suitable for inner reflection, as well as crowded areas populated by sometimes inept characters shedding light on our own present-day lives; our dreams and ambitions; and how we look upon time, space and each other.









http://www.hansopdebeeck.com/
Visual artist Hans Op de Beeck lives and works in Brussels, where he has developed his career through international exhibitions over the past ten years. His work consists of sculptures, installations, video work, photography, animated films, drawings, paintings and writing (short stories). It is his quest for the most effective way of presenting the concrete contents of each work that determines the medium that the artist ultimately selects. The scale can vary from the size of a small watercolour to a large, three-dimensional installation of 300m2.
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.

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.

Hans Op de Beeck sometimes calls his works "proposals"; they are irrefutably fictional, constructed and staged, leaving it up to the viewer whether to take the work seriously, as a sort of parallel reality, or immediately to put it into perspective, as no more than a visual construct. His work is nourished by a keen interest in social and cultural reflection. The artist also questions the difficult 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. The visual output of that investigation often produces slumbering, insidious, melancholy and astonishing images.










http://www.hollandfestival.nl


On 31 May 2008, the new installation “Location (6)” by Hans Op de Beeck will premiere as part of the Holland Festival in Amsterdam.

Visual artist Hans Op de Beeck has now created “Location (6)” (2008) – a monumental installation intended for the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam. The Westergasfabriek is a former gas works that has been turned into a thriving multifunctional cultural center. This installation-art creation draws on Op de Beeck’s interest in manmade vistas, as well as his fascination with melancholic barren spaces devoid of human life.

His new work is a worthy successor to the sculptural installation “Location (5)” (2004). This particular installation was earlier on display in the Municipal Museum in The Hague and the Art Unlimited exhibition in Basel, Switzerland and has now been given a permanent home at the Towada Art Center in Japan. “Location (5)” is a pitch-black “mockup” of a motorway fast-food restaurant looking out on a deserted motorway (highway) in the dead of night.

The new installation “Location (6)” is based on a similar principle: the viewer is inside a building and is looking out at the wider world – in this case, a vast expanse of land stretching out as far as the eye can see. The exterior space has once again been created in the form of a monumental landscape sculpture with an incrementally manipulated perspective (perspectival trompe-l'œil). Visually speaking, however, “Location (6)” is almost the opposite of its predecessor. Through a hallway, the spectator reaches an observatory with a panoramic window offering a view of an imaginary desolate snowy landscape. Everything basks in white light and is shrouded in a fog. The whole place has an ephemeral, almost immaterial feel about it that invites viewer to gaze into the near-nothingness.





Hans has his hands full with a range of artistic projects, and Merry-go-round typifies his work in taking abstract normality and creating meaning around it. The walk-through installation attracted lines of people who would step into another world, a winter scene of dark childhood memories and eerie music that transport the crowds into another world. It's magic.