Koen van den Broek. Out of Place

The gaze that looks ahead and then slowly wanders down or to the side, looking for traces and signs of a landscape, rather than the landscape itself. Van den Broek paints what others pay no attention to or simply overlook. Cracks, borders, shadows, lines, corners, and also bridges, trees, trucks, reflections. They are set up crisply, and stripped of their frills (or as van den Broek puts it: “Cut away the snoopy!”), which leaves them somewhere between figuration and abstraction. Are we in a video game or in a sun-drenched Californian landscape? It’s hard to say. Van den Broek is greatly fascinated by the American panorama, immeasurably wide and lonely, without human figures. Like an experienced DJ, he easily mixes and samples elements from gray-looking Belgium and the country’s artists (De Keyser, Raveel, Spilliaert) with characteristics of American colleagues and idols (Ruscha, Baldessari, Newman). Until at some point he starts sampling himself, and half abstraction becomes complete abstraction. Completely out of place. Out of Place is the largest and most comprehensive monograph on van den Broek’s work to date. It covers a career spanning more than twenty years. Author John C. Welchman, a prominent academic who previously wrote similar surveys about Guillaume Bijl and Mike Kelley, and who has been a long-time friend of the artist, describes and analyses van den Broek’s oeuvre to date in a masterly overview. The Complete Koen van den Broek.