Hoet Bekaert, Gent
Hoet Bekaert Gallery focuses on promoting, supporting and showing young contemporary artists, covering divers media such as painting, video, installation, photography and performance. The gallery was founded in an old abbey, the summer of 2003, opening with an ambitious group-show of, among others, Jason Rhoades, Sisley Xhafa, Kris Martin, Franky DC, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Joost Conijn and Kendell Geers.
In September 2005, the gallery moved to the grounds of an old factory building in the city of Gent. This new site combines the clean, white museum-like cube with a huge backspace of a more trashy character. Like this, the gallery wants to offer to its artists a wider range of possibilities, functioning as a laboratory for young contemporary art.
For Art-O-Rama Hoet Bekaert Gallery will be presenting new works by two artists: Fien Muller and Hannes Vanseveren along with a pall mall of works by other artists of the gallery.
Hannes Vanseveren’s (born 1979) art is characterized by the connection between reality on one side and the imaginary on the other side.
In his sculptural works, Vanseveren is starting from an existing object that he is elaborating throughout his personal fantasy into a totally new object. For this purpose he always selects the “genuine forms” of those objects – a traditional Flemish chest of drawers or a recognizable public bench – and uses them as an issue to show the spectator the absurdity of the reality around us.
However the different aspects of the new object are not having any relationship, but their harmony and contrasting connection do not exclude some imaginary function. That way he creates a half-recognizable object that belongs to a world with unintelligible rules. The purpose of Vanseveren’s work is to turn reality into something subjective and to make it lose its objective obviousness.
Fien Muller’s (born 1978) art is balancing on the edge between photography and video art. She started as a photographer and, by then, was photographing the reality she was living in, adopting a documentary style. During her complementary schooling, she discovered video as a new medium and as a new working method as well. In her video works she will no longer use the camera for making images in a reporter style, but will be inverting the process by creating a pro-filmic reality. Quoting Thomas Caron : “After all Muller’s work always consists in a still life, moving or not moving, looking for simplicity and purity in form and content.”
For Art-O-Rama, Fien Muller will be presenting a new series of 16 photographs that centre on her research about form, colour and plastic composition.