Koen van den Broek
Paintings from the USA and Japan

Koen van den Broek is a painter of spaces. His work constantly hovers between the conceptual space of the painting and the depiction of the real world. Highways, curbs, parks, and more are reduced to planes and broad lines that lead to the reality of the painted image. Van den Broek paints mental spaces. The depicted space peculiarly alienates itself from the reality from which it originated. This alienation originates from van den Broek’s painting process.

Van den Broek always starts from photographic snapshots he takes during his many travels. He makes an initial selection of images he wishes to use. The framing of the used photos largely determines the image plane within which he will set up his painting. This framing ranges from an extreme enlargement of details from reality to a more ‘open,’ almost expansive delineation of the photographed space.

This exhibition at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens shows a selection of van den Broek’s paintings created in recent years. Most canvases are based on photos taken during his travels to America and Japan. However, it is not a retrospective exhibition but rather an in-depth selection of the most significant works based on these travels. Koen van den Broek explicitly chose to combine and confront the images from the distant West and the Far East in the same exhibition. The new meanings that these ‘contradictory’ images acquire through such confrontation are of fundamental importance to Koen van den Broek and are part of the work.

The selection of paintings was chosen by Koen van den Broek himself and comes from various collections in Belgium and abroad