The art of Benjamin Bubb.
Visual spectacle on the main road heading South. A blue sky slowly gets stacked up with vertical piles of gray-white chaos. Tiny beams of sunlight penetrate the few remaining openings. Not long before this beautiful show of nature get’s washed away from my windshield.
It must have been about five years since I first met the artist Benjamin Bubb (°1992) in his studio in Ghent, Belgium. There I got to know his visual work, mainly large canvases with both dynamic and modest sea views. It was an experimental setting when I visited him back then. There were cloths in the…
The work of Wladimir Moszowski.
Dreams are gates to memory. My childhood regularly appears in my dreams, unattended and absurd in a way. The vast meadows that we overlooked, my small room at the time and the field-track that ran past our property, all memories of places that linger on. Due to this spatial dimension in my dreams, I still feel closely and vividly connected with these places today, even though I left them 20 years ago. Only the field-track still exists, although it is no longer public accessible. Memory, space and dream are closely linked and not necessarily in that specific order.
I arrive in Nazareth, Belgium on a cold and clear winter morning. Before I get the chance to step out of my car, Jean De Groote walks towards me through a big black iron gate. “The front door is jammed and this way of greeting a visitor has become a habit after all these years” he confides to me with a soft pat on the back. The reception betrays an ever unremitting enthusiasm.
Jean De Groote has been working as a visual artist for more than 40 years now. His paintings are regularly exhibited at his home gallery S. & H. De Buck in Ghent. In recent months he has been producing intensive new visual work from his studio that is located on the first floor. “This monks cell” Isolde De Buck mentioned in the catalog at the most recent exhibition “Les fleurs de Rue du temple,” is his daily biotope. There a magical process unfolds repeatedly. What has perceptually entered and processed, is ironed back out onto canvas. He is preparing his…
Make your freelance work more meaningful
Freelancers are managers. They manage their own affairs. They are their own bosses. To a certain extent, this gives them the necessary freedom to decide for themselves what to do and to be less accountable to superiors or other managers.
Although.
The greater freedom to plan your own work yourself, serve customers, monitor costs and income, etc. entails a different risk. Days and working hours are more fluid and you have to think carefully about when to do something. This is certainly the case if you work part-time for an employer and work as a freelancer in a secondary job.
…
‘Never look away’ (Werk ohne Autor) — F.H. von Donnersmarck
Some things are too good to be true. Such as attending the press premiere of the latest movie ‘Werk ohne Autor’ (Never look away) at the Brussels Cinéma Aventure. All present film critics shared great expectations about this third feature film by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck after the Oscar film ‘Das Leben der Anderen’ (2006) and the Hollywood production ‘The Tourist’ (2010). The story shows the life of Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling as older Kurt) and is inspired by the life of the world’s most expensive living painter Gerhard Richter.
On the Belgian expo ‘Frozen Moments’
I’m wandering thoughts in the drizzly rain when I stroll through centre of Ghent towards Hotel Falligan, an 18th century rococo house at the historical Kouter (Belgium). That’s where the Francis Maere Gallery is located on the first floor. Two tall statues by artist Hanneke Beaumont flank the main entrance in a stately and dynamic manner. A harbinger for more to come. The building is solemn and monumental, tailored to the sculptural work that I will soon experience.
Hanneke Beaumont is internationally renowned as a Dutch artist with work in New York, Canada, Europe and recently also India and other parts of Asia. One of her most famous works ‘Le départ’ (# 35 — bronze, 1998) has long been admired in the national airport of Zaventem. Two seemingly identical figures look at each other in counterpoint, dressed in simple robes. They just said goodbye and turned to each other one last time. They are aligned, ready to split the shared moment of life and each go their own way, to leave for their own destiny. In the gallery…
Koen J. Van Damme
father • art journalist - critic & historian • writer • lecturer • musician
