Galerie Ron Mandos is delighted to present its first Gallery Viewer exhibition of Art Brussels 2020. The online exhibition focuses on five recent paintings that are part of the retrospective exhibition of Koen van den Broek, thereby drawing special attention to innovation and experimentation by the renowned Belgian artist.
Koen van den Broek (BE, 1973) is well-known for his paintings of curbs, cracks and shadows; things we pass by every day but no longer really see. For twenty years, the artist has been experimenting with his representation of these often disregarded and detailed elements. Take for instance Disorder, a painting from 2020: at first sight it seems a purely abstract blue painting with a playful grid of black lines. In reality, these lines represent the cracks that stretch endlessly on the road surface of the U.S. interstate.
In his newest works, Van den Broek uses mixed techniques that bring the materiality of his painting closer to that of grainy asphalt. The texture becomes part of the image and voids are treated like spaces. The cracks seem to hover above the surface of the road becoming autonomous as a kind of lyric network conflicting with the painted surface below. Van den Broek also experiments with the materiality of painting in Carrara - Bruegel, a work from 2019. The title Carrara refers to the white marble surface that dominates this painting. The large field of white represents the white surface of a major public installation the artist recently created for the exhibition 450 years Bruegel.