M HKA Ensembles

Painting, 100 x 150 cm.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. BK7658_M419).

Van den Broek mainly became known for his disorienting canvases of roadsides, sidewalks, gutters and other ‘horizontal’ boundaries and border areas. And while they are taken from the most banal of everyday reality, these canvases inevitably tend towards a hieratic abstraction. The figurative residue shimmers through even more explicitly in a series of related works, two examples of which have been acquired by the museum (one a gift of the artist): close-ups of a parched piece of land, or a road surface ridden by deep cracks. Maybe the perspective changes, but in his works ‘190#1’ and ‘190#2’ (both from 2004), Van den Broek remains true to the structural leitmotif in his oeuvre: that of the ground from which the world that we inhabit and navigate, arises.