Galerie Ron Mandos is excited to participate in the 2021 Ballroom Project, during the Antwerp Art Weekend from 13-16 May 2021. This year we’ll be showing the works of Koen van den Broek.
New Works by Koen van den Broek
As an offshoot of his retrospective exhibition The Beginning at Galerie Ron Mandos in 2020 – a survey of twenty years of painting – Koen van den Broek created a new series of works for which he unearthed his personal archive of analogue photography. Restricted by this year’s travel bans, the Belgian artist was confined to using his old travel photos from the early 2000s. Analogue photography constitutes an integral part of Van den Broek’s practice. The use of perspective, color and lighting in the original photos are key to his choice of the painting’s subject.
In the new paintings we see street scenes of New York and Los Angeles. The atmosphere of empty buildings and unpopulated streets suggests that Van den Broek took his photos early in the morning. The artist sees beauty in the often-dilapidated Art Deco buildings, of which there are so many in L.A. The lettering in the window signs of an old furniture store is almost illegible and the architectural ornament of an old warehouse is loosely sketched. The quickly painted street scenes refer to fast-moving Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch films, as well as to paintings by a number of great modern painters. In Red Lines, the composition alludes to a geometric abstract painting by Barnett Newman. At the same time, it is reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning, and the panoramic red line of the top floor’s façade depicted in that painting.