Interview with Artist Hans Op de Beeck

The Collector’s House, courtesy of the artist

Hans Op de Beeck: On Silence, Visual Fiction, and the Tragicomic Human Condition

Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck (b. 1969) is one of the most compelling multi-disciplinary voices working today. Based in Brussels, Op de Beeck creates large-scale immersive installations, sculptures, art films, monumental watercolour paintings, and striking photography — works that invite viewers into hushed, parallel worlds suspended between the everyday and the eternal.

Interview by Leila Antakly

Your practice spans an extraordinary range of disciplines. Can you give us an overview of your work?

I produce large-scale immersive installations, sculptures, art films, large watercolour paintings, and photographs. Since 2015, I also became professionally active in the performing arts: I wrote and directed three theatre plays, creating the scenography and costumes for each. Since 2018, I have also been directing opera, again combining that with scenography and costume design.

At the core of everything I make is a reflection on our complex society and the universal questions of meaning and mortality that resonate within it. I regard man as a being who stages the world around him in a tragi-comic way. Above all, I want to stimulate the viewer's senses and invite them to fully experience the parallel worlds I evoke — works that deliver a moment of wonder, silence, and soothing consolation, and that resonate with life as we know it.

Over the past twenty years, Hans Op de Beeck has realised many immersive installations evoking what he describes as visual fictions: tactile, deserted spaces — empty sets for the viewer to walk through or sit down in, sculpted havens for introspection. In his films and autonomous sculptures, by contrast, he is happy to prominently depict the most diverse cast of characters.

Recent highlights include Staging Silence (3) (2019), screened at Tate Modern in London, and the sculpture The Horseman (2020), exhibited at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.

Current projects include stage direction, scenography, and costumes for a new opera production composed by Wim Henderickx for opera houses in Antwerp, Ghent, and Rouen; a second production with choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui; a 1,900 m² immersive installation for the Biennale of Lyon; and a 2,000 m² solo show for the Amos Rex Museum in Helsinki.

What are your greatest inspirations and influences?

Simply, everyday life — with its obstacles, awkwardness, and moments of beauty and emotion — is my greatest source of inspiration. I love to depart from small and seemingly unimportant things as a starting point for universal questions about our human condition, about our tragicomic existence.

As a spectator and art lover, I deeply appreciate filmmakers like the Coen Brothers, writers like Raymond Carver, painters like Peter Doig, actors like Frances McDormand, and composers like Wim Henderickx. But I wouldn't call these people influences on my own work — rather, they are artists who reveal the power of the arts to me, and by doing so, encourage and strengthen me to keep believing in the incredible importance of creation.

Walk us through your creative process.

When I create large-scale immersive installations — even when they appear dark or gloomy — my first aim is always to create a calm, silent, consoling atmosphere. I try to make the visitor as receptive as possible to fully experience the work. When the viewer accepts my invitation to take time, to walk through or sit down in my space and breathe that atmosphere of tranquillity, I can then offer a collection of references and layers that speak about much more — things they can gradually discover or unveil.

I will never fully explain all the references a viewer could find in my large-scale installations — that might harm the newly found chemistry and inner logic of the whole, or be understood as a form of legitimation. The main idea is that my visual fictions speak about life, actuality, and history by themselves, without textual guidance, in both a seemingly simple and a deeply layered way.

A large part of my sculptural works, watercolours, and photographs are achromic — in grey tones, black and white. But many of video works and quite a few installations and sculptures are in full colour or a deliberate combination of a few colours.

The works without colour are where I love to fully focus on the play of light and shadow, and how that gives life to a three-dimensional shape more directly. Colour in those cases would be a distraction. For some installations and for sculptures of the human figure, I use my own specific grey — tender and velvet-like — which makes them appear frozen in time, petrified. It silences down the sculptures and creates a mood of tranquillity I hope to convey to the viewer.

I prefer to abstract reality and create an evocation of mood, atmosphere, and internalised feeling. I love to evoke, not to simulate. My works are a proposal to the viewer in the same way that fictitious characters in a novel are propositions to the reader — a parallel world the receiver knows is a construction of a creative mind, and yet can find an authentic, real, and profound experience within.

My watercolours are almost three metres wide and are worked layer by layer. I paint at night, starting around eight in the evening when my assistants have left and the studio is silent. Ideally I work on a watercolour for around twelve hours straight. For most paintings I then need one or two extra nights to finish the detail. The night sets the right tone — it is probably romantic nonsense, but the nocturnal mood seems to me the ultimate environment for works that, in their content, are all nocturnal.

How did the pandemic affect your creativity, and how do you see the world changing?

Over those two years, I remained productive, but mentally it was not easy. Just before the pandemic broke out, there was such a strong sense of optimism and rampant energy in my life; I had just happily booked a trip for my four children and myself to go to New York in the Spring of 2020, my studio was in full swing.

But suddenly the tragic news of all those first victims worldwide arrived, and all the restrictions that came with it. Meanwhile, amongst other difficulties within my close family, my eldest sister was battling cancer in the hospital and was declared incurable, and because of the pandemic, only one fixed visitor -my youngest sister- could go and see her, and no-one else was allowed. So even my already isolated elderly mother, was unable to visit her own terminally ill daughter at the hospital; that was such a sad situation. Fortunately, towards the very end, that was possible again, when my sister spent her last days at the palliative care. To lose someone that close in your life by itself is so hard, but in the setting of the pandemic truly even more challenging. 

Some colleagues told me the isolation caused by the pandemic was a gift for their art, because of all the cancelled exhibitions and travelling, and the sudden emergence of available time for self-reflection and the exploration of new paths in their practice. But in my case, it felt more like a numbing situation; my oxygen comes from the constant and parallel flowing of things, and not from a sudden standstill. 

Like just about everywhere, also in Belgium social life was paralyzed by lockdowns, the closing of bars, restaurants, theatres, the heavily restricted social contacts... Whereas as an artist you choose isolation when it is welcome or necessary for your creations, having an obliged additional one on top of that, to me, simply felt like too much.

Most of my major museum projects, and events such as biennials initially planned for 2021, had been postponed to 2022, leaving my calendar for next year overloaded. On the other hand, the pandemic also had financial consequences for my studio because many art fairs were cancelled or only took place online. 

Who would you consider an icon of our time?

It is a tricky question. In these complicated times, there are unfortunately many negative icons — extreme right populist politicians, celebrities without the slightest merits — who represent the severe problems of our era all too well. But there are also genuinely inspiring figures. Greta Thunberg is someone I would call a true icon of our time.

What does wellbeing mean to you?

Wellbeing is an inner sense of simplicity, acceptance, and clarity — feeling at home with oneself, and, most of all, the absence of conflict. It means being content with life as it is: understanding that life doesn't need to be spectacular or rich in events, but that what is, is fine, exactly as it is.

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Quiet Place, courtesy of the artist

Botsauto, courtesy of the artist

“ Location 5”