The largest and most comprehensive monograph on van den Broek's work to date, a complete survey of 1998 until now, on over 700 pages, presented and analysed by John C. Welchman.
In Out of Place, noted LA-based art historian John C. Welchman offers a tour-de-force discussion of the first 25 years of Koen van den Broek's work. The book is partly chronological, partly attentive to the genres, styles, media and concepts around which the artist has innovated, from painting to public space. Welchman unpacks a wide spectrum of references and allusions—to Mondrian, Malevich, Matisse, Rothko and many other modernist artists; to postwar photographies; to the art cinemas of the 1960s and '70s; and to the history of freeways, interstates and the evolution of the singular urban fabrics of the United States. He offers exciting new accounts of the defining orientation of the first decade of van den Broek's painting as it entered into pathbreaking pictorial dialogues with borders, shadows and cracks. The second part of the monograph takes up with a frankly surprising range of ideas and issues connected to figures, identities, landscape, ecology, appropriation, opera, and institutions … and to the striking material appurtenances of Formula 1 racing.
In his painterly exploration of urban details such a cracks on the road, Belgian painter Koen van den Broek (born 1973 in Bree) develops an ambiguous kind of representation. Looking down at the asphalt and often using photographs as references, his paintings operate by zooming in on their subjects, eventually leading the painter towards abstraction. His work shows traces of human presence: circus tents, highways, bridges, sewers, pipes, fragments of houses or cars. The artist seeks out anonymity, the general rather than the specific. This relationship vis-à-vis photography is essential to his work. Playfulness, diversity and duality—rigid delineation versus wild brush strokes, depth versus surface—are all characteristic of his work. Koen Van den Broek questions the viewing schemes of photography. His paintings are anti-images, reactions against the recordings of the camera.
