Hans Op de Beeck: Celebration

29 November 2008 - 24 January 2009

Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, IT

Galleria Continua is pleased to announce Celebration, the third exhibition by the Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck to be held at the Galleria Continua in San Gimignano.

Op de Beeck’s propensity for a multidisciplinary approach leads him to work with a range of different materials and media: sculpture, installations, multimedia works, video, film, drawings and photographs. Highly imaginative scenarios are conceived and constructed on the basis of images conjured up by the memory, which might be of places but also of domestic or urban situations. The artist then presents them to the viewer as new visual, emotive and sensorial experiences.

For his new solo show in Italy, Hans Op de Beeck presents a previously unshown video entitled Celebration (2008). Shot in Arizona, the video features a front-on view of a festively bedecked table in a decidedly improbably location: the middle of a landscape of imposing rocks, sun-baked earth and cactus plants. The scene is a real tableau vivant, where the only movement is the rustling of the tablecloth in the breeze. Time also seems to be immobile, frozen in the moment prior to the celebration, possibly that of a wedding anniversary. Everything is ready, the festivities are about to begin, yet tiny but by no means negligible details hint at the inevitability of a tragedy. The video conveys a sense of emptiness, as if the party will necessarily be disappointing.

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