The art of disappearing

In the studio of silence

For over three decades now, visual artist Hans Op de Beeck has been building a recognisable universe: a world without colour, yet overflowing with emotion. Until 7 November, you can discover it at Galerie Almine Rech in Brussels. Vanishing Point is his first solo exhibition there: a trail of furniture, sculptures, and set pieces, all steeped in the same ashen mist that defines his work.

Still during his studies, Hans made a work of art that contained the seed of all his later art: a scale model of a deserted nighttime crossing, complete with working traffic lights. It became the start of the Location series, places no one recognises yet everyone feels they know.

Since settling in as an artist in residence at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2003, his practice has grown into something that can hardly be called studio work anymore. For Sea of Tranquillity (2010), for instance, he rebuilt an entirely fictional maritime museum, complete with wax figures, ship models, and an original jazz composition, spanning some five hundred square metres of exhibition space. For The Collector's House (2016), visitors walked through a deserted twenty-metre-long townhouse. His permanent installation at the Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp and public works such as Lily Pond in Tongeren and The Quiet View in Hasselt prove that his grey world holds up outside the gallery walls too. Hans, it turns out, has a distinct feel for storytelling.

"I see life as a tragicomic whole." – Hans Op de Beeck

That tragicomedy runs through almost everything he makes: a deserted crossing, a waiting supermarket cashier, a couple silently sharing a drink. Yet he always invites the viewer to decide for themselves whether they're stepping into an alternate reality, or simply looking at a carefully constructed image. Recognisable scenes that, precisely through what he leaves out, take on a faintly absurd charge. Internationally, that has made him a fixture of the art world.

Working from a large studio in Anderlecht, he collaborates with a permanent team on sculptures, installations, animated films, photographs, drawings, texts, and music, all at once — a scale of production closer to a film studio than to the image of the artist sketching alone in a corner. His newer work, too, still bathes in the same atmosphere as his older creations: it evokes a sense of desolation. Gradually, though, his focus has shifted toward a more existential theme, one centred on the human search for meaning and transience.

Colourless, yet very much alive

The title of this exhibition, Vanishing Point, is more than a stylistic device. The vanishing point is the spot in classical perspective theory where all lines converge and the gaze loses itself infinitely in depth. The artist uses that principle as a guiding thread. For him, this is not a technical trick, but something closer to a way of life. Just as a vanishing point can never truly be reached, the meaning of his work remains forever just out of reach. Each object shows just enough to spark curiosity, never enough to complete the story.

Colour has long been the great absence in that universe. Hans worked consistently in shades of ash, anthracite, and chalk white. By stripping away colour, his objects take on something ghostly. The objects lose their immediate recognisability. A set table, an interior, a carousel: they no longer seem fully anchored in the present, as though on the verge of vanishing, or of appearing again. Time doesn't stand still here — it hesitates. In Vanishing Point, new and older work in colour stand alongside these monochrome images for the first time.

Visitors wander through this exhibition among works including Cécile, a life-size mixed-media figure, and Seascape, a seascape in polyester that feels at once massive and fragile. Alongside the sculptures, you'll also find a number of watercolours and the eponymous animated film Vanishing Point, a slow, almost hypnotic choreography of images in which time seems to stand still.

Let Vanishing Point by Hans Op de Beeck draw you into a solitary silence within his, as he calls it himself, 'cabinet of curiosities'.

Image:

Hans Op de Beeck
Cécile & Seascape, 2026 & 2022
Cécile, 2026
Life-sized sculpture
Mixed media

Seascape, 2022
Polyester

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