Hans Op de Beeck ( Turnhout 1969 )

Hans Op de Beeck is a multi - disciplinary artist whose work includes sculptures, installations, video art, photographs, drawings, paintings, and text. His oeuvre is a visual reflection on how we as human beings clumsily and tragicomically deal with time, space and one another, and continuously stage our lives and surroundings, both on the small and the large scale, in this complex post-modern era. Op de Beeck’s creations vary in size from small watercolors to installations measuring 500 square meters. Backyard, which the artist conceived and realized for Museum to Scale 1/7, fits thematically within his oeuvre. Op de Beeck depicts a neglected private garden – in particular a backyard with a pond, an old palm tree, an old sofa and a football – in which everything has the texture and color of gray concrete, including the uninviting concrete slabs that enclose the garden. Bathed in strange, extremely weak and diffuse light, it shows how a fictitious resident must have conceived a little private paradise for his family and how this small, staged idyll has now turned into an utterly desolate and alienating place. 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.

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