Eva Steynen.Deviation(s) is proud to present for the spring edition of Art Rotterdam new works by gallery artists Christine Clinckx, Wannes Lecompte, Johannes Ulrich Kubiak, Robert Soroko and Jan Verbruggen, .
CHRISTINE CLINCKX - ° 1969, lives and works in Antwerp
Multimedia artist, performer and activist Christine Clinckx combines actuality and history in her installations and photographic work. Her photographic prints are made with an early 20th-century large-format camera obscura using a 19th-century wet-plate collodion process. In Art Rotterdam she shows a series of photograms on light-sensitive paper and printed on metal.
The works are part of an ongoing project based on a combination of found landscape photographs and family pictures. By cutting these images up and then manipulating them, their original meaning and function are disturbed and transformed, with ghost-like figures haunting landscapes of the past.
Clinckx combines historic and contemporary photographic techniques, giving rise to serendipitous and evocative imperfections - streaks, scratches, spots, and pits that estrange the original subject.
Clinckx' work shows how the past continuously penetrates the present and how we relate to this interaction amongst contemporary events and personal experiences, combining anonymous historical sources of familial relationships with private autobiographical narratives and critical engagement. Referring both literally and figuratively to the passage of time, capturing tensions between nature, history and memory.
Clinckx studied at the Royal Academy for Fine Arts Antwerp (1989 - 1992). Since then her work was on view in numerous exhibitions national and international. She has a solo show at the gallery, opening during Antwerp Art Weekend 26. May.
WANNES LECOMPTE - °1979 (B), lives and works in Brussels
The painting wants to be a painting! For almost twenty years this is Wannes Lecompte's credo, celebrating the act of painting itself. And how he does! His oil on canvas is more than composition of color, texture and rhythm. Lecompte convoking and provoking chance, in a voluntary slow process, waits in front of the empty canvas until the painting presents itself. His interlacing brushstrokes mingle, one color over the other, packed together and surrounded by the white emptiness of the canvas.
Without trying to present a figure, Lecompte his scriptural paintings reveal slowly their poetic composition. Arrangements of density enforced by the emptiness around, compositions as well of sonorities as it is of silences. They show an intensity of the instant, that one unique moment, simultaneously slowing down and revealing the 'drums' of our times.
Wannes Lecompte holds a Master's degree in fine arts (2005, Sint-Lucas, Antwerpen) and studied painting in Sint Lucas, Ghent and Künsthochschule Weissensee (Berlin). His work is exhibited since 2003 in Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany.
JOHANNES ULRICH KUBIAK - °1961 Annaberg-Buchholz (D), lives and works since 1981 in Berlin (D) and since 2018 in Antwerp (B).
Over the past 30 years, Johannes Ulrich Kubiak has engaged in a process of experimentation with a variety of media in order to research depth, colour and structure. His work challenges and intertwines traditional genres and techniques in painting, drawing and photography informed by shifts in contemporary digital media.
In his drive to explore different media and investigate what lies beneath the surface, Kubiak‘s work shifted from 1992 – 2002 from painting to photography. For ten years, he worked in the artistic collaborative of Kubiak & Rauch. Similar to his pursuits in painting, he explored transparency of layers and the use of different supports in the photographic process.
This visibility of process is still apparent in Kubiak‘s paintings. The basis is a research for structure and depth. Throughout composition they disrupt and new forms emerge out of structures of colour.
J.U.Kubiak has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Germany, U.S., Austria, France, Belgium. His work is held in several collections, incl., Deutsche Bank, Bundesbank, Kunstsammlung Sachsen, Berlinische Galerie.
ROBERT SOROKO - °1990 B, lives and works in Antwerp - searches for possibilities to keep his sculptures mobile. By wind or by hand they move very subtile, almost invisible. Hard materials like metal he gives form, they show a captured movement, as if the welding has suddenly stopped. Although they are robust they show a purified simple line.
Combining wood with iron. Or steel figures that come in clear basic colours. Making a different intervention depending on the material an space. They recall to figures out of old cultures. Being himself a master in Tai-Chi reflects in the slow elegant movements of Soroko's sculptures. They are like organic figures that seem walking out of another world.
Robert Soroko holds a Master's degree visual art (sculpture, 2018 Royal Academy Antwerp). Since 2016 he exhibits in Belgium and The Netherlands. His works were recently shown at a.o. Anne Gentils gallery, Antwerp, Kunstenfestival Aardenburg, NL (curated by Hans Theys), Emmergent, Veurne (BE), Wals, Herzele (BE) Kanal Centre Pompidou, Brussels (BE).
Soroko prepares his first solo show opening at the gallery end of September 2022.
JAN VERBRUGGEN - °1980 (B), lives and works in Brussels
Jan Verbruggen is a story teller. His oil paintings and gouaches on paper show surrealist fragments out of fictive events. As a spectator we witness how these events are literally intruded by floral landscapes.
Using the classical technic of the 'grisaille' underpainting, permits him to define composition, lightning and atmosphere of his work and develop a clear vision of the overall sense of the painting. With a lush and baroque colour pallet Verbruggen's sceneries turn estranged and reveal a certain unheimlich feeling, always with a twist.
His imaginary spaces create an in-between world that is transformative and offers an insight behind the surface of the visible; an 'embodied space', where the private and outside world literally immerse.
Jan Verbruggen holds a Master in Visual Arts-Fine Arts of the LUCA School of Arts, Brussels. For several years he was chairman of 'W-O-L-K-E' an artist run initiative to create innovative spaces for artistic encounters. His works have been exhibited, among others, at BOZAR (Brussels), Bellevue Museum, Brussels, Gallery Fortlaan 17 (Ghent, B), SecondRoom (Antwerp & Brussels), Somos Art, Berlin (D), DOM (Brussels), Positions Art Fair Berlin, Eva Steynen.Deviation(s), Art Rotterdam (NL).