We are pleased to welcome you to ‘Prelude’ an exhibition with 8 new and unseen paintings from 2024 by Hans Vandekerckhove, titled ‘Christina’s Flowers’. The exhibition is a prelude to the larger presentation of paintings planned at the gallery in autumn of 2025.
Nature plays a prominent role in Hans Vandekerckhove’s practice: the artist often depicts trees as a forest, representing the larger whole or community, but equally as a solitary ‘character’. In a painting from 2016 in which Vandekerckhove appears to have painted a tree whisperer, he questions whether trees dream. This work, depicted in the latest monograph ‘Silence is a Message’ (2024) was gifted to Paul & Magda, friends of the artist whose garden has been a source of inspiration to Hans for more than two decades.
When Paul died in 2023, he left a park garden. Hans painted this garden, the pond, the trees as a tribute to his erudite friend whose motto was ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’. While these paintings were being created, Christina, Hans’s wife, provided flower bouquets in the studio. Painted like jewels against a dark background, they are a kind of mini Hortus Conclusus depicting Paul & Magda’s beautiful park garden within the confined framework of the painting studio: paintings depicting spring in slow-motion.
Hans Vandekerckhove is a painter pur sang and focuses on motifs with a deep-rooted tradition in Western visual art: the Rückenfigur, the gardener, the garden and horticulture, greenhouses, bridges and related architectural motifs, the Hieronymus motif, the girl figure, the romantic landscape, the totem animal, the sacra conversation and the annunciation motif. He is a romantic and individualist who evolved from a neo-expressionist style (early 1980s) to a quasi-abstract image inspired by alchemical motifs (1990s) and then, from 1998 onwards, returned to figuration and substantive themes. Vandekerckhove focuses on the pictorial relationship between motif and background and people and environment.
‘Silence is a Message’, the 4th monograph on Vandekerckhove’s practice is available at the gallery.
Hans Vandekerckhove (BE, 1957) lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. In his more than 30-year career, Vandekerckhove has had exhibitions in both galleries and museums, including Mu.ZEE, Ostend (BE), SMAK, Ghent (BE), Art4Museum, Moscow (RU), MKM Duisburg (DE), Fundación Ambères, Madrid (ES), Museum Xanten (DE) and Musée Rolin, Autun (FR). His work can be found in the collections of Mu.ZEE Ostend (BE), the Flemish Government (BE), The Phoebus Foundation (BE) and Museum Minden (DE), among others, as well as private collections worldwide.
