Philippe Van Snick

The solo exhibition on the Belgian artist Philippe Van Snick (°1946) includes works from his early period as well as recent examples, both new creations and large space-filling compositions. His extensive body of work is presented by means of carefully selected works produced over a period of more than forty years. The exhibition offers an opportunity to explore the artist's 'sober' artistic production that is closely linked to minimal and conceptual art.

The forms, objects and colours Philippe Van Snick uses in his oeuvre never stand alone; they always relate to the space and include the viewer's physical experience of the work. By using a simple and restricted formal vocabulary – always imbued with a desire for order –, Van Snick endeavours to describe the essence of life. His work is a mixture of conceptual photography, mathematics, fragile sculptures and colour.

Everyday experiences are a major source of inspiration with the theme of day and night triggering a particularly large number of works. The rhythm of light and dark, active and passive and the subconscious versus the conscious, are other closely linked themes. For Van Snick painting is not confined to the painted surface. It is a study of the relationship of the work to the space it is in and of the individual viewer's experience of that work. His paintings, drawings, photographs, slides and installations examine, analyze and create space by means of a minimal artistic idiom. The space, the image, the looking, the viewer and the interpretation of all these details are central to his work. For M, Van Snick creates a new colourful intervention, Spheres.

Curator: Luk Lambrecht. Exhibtition supported by IVOK, de Vlaamse Overheid and Provincie Vlaams Brabant.

Philippe van Snick
Kurator: Luk Lambrecht