Beige, Brussels
Ann van der Ploeg
The presentation brings together a new body of work by Ann van der Ploeg, spanning sculpture, painting and wood carving. Her practice explores the relationship between societal imagination, language and mental imagery. The works are informed by the idea of skywriting, a concept that emerged during the artist’s long-distance travels between Europe and South Africa, where fleeting messages written across the sky become a metaphor for language in motion.
For Art-O-Rama Beige propose an installation that brings together the different media within van der Ploeg’s practice. Although she has long worked across multiple forms, her paintings and sculptures have rarely been presented together. This booth foregrounds the dialogue between them, emphasizing how language can be translated into material form.
Van der Ploeg’s work draws on linguistic theory, particularly the idea that language is not only spoken but embodied and performed. Her sculptures reference idiomatic expressions and communal utterances that carry social, political and economic histories. Working between concept-driven art and a tactile material poetics, she creates objects that function like sentences: layered, open-ended and shaped by shared meaning.
Recurring motifs include hands, mouths and forms inspired by the sphericon, a mathematically continuous object that appears to move endlessly. These forms operate as metaphors for idioms themselves—expressions that travel across cultures and time. Crafted from multiplex plywood, a material both utilitarian and poetic, the works hover between sculpture and painting, between legibility and abstraction.
Following a recent commission for a painted ceiling in Stellenbosch, South Africa, van der Ploeg proposes a painted cotton ceiling for the booth. Suspended overhead, the textile evokes skywriting while creating a spatial link between the viewer and the works below, subtly altering perspective and atmosphere.
