Jan Van Imschoot: The End Is Never Near

The End Is Never Near is the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to the work of Belgian artist Jan Van Imschoot. It traces a rough chronological trajectory that spans more than 30 years and features over 80 of his paintings, including several polyptychs. The End Is Never Near takes you from the intimate, enigmatic works of the early 1990s to the more recent, large-scale tableaux that are explicitly inspired by history. These are the works for which Van Imschoot, a long-time resident of France, is best known internationally. 

Van Imschoot belongs to a generation of artists who laid the foundations for the critical reappraisal of figurative painting in the 1990s. Among his peers, Van Imschoot’s work occupies a unique place due to the profound art-historical awareness that underpins his practice. He paints the here and now, and his work by no means sidesteps the burning issues of the day—gender, identity, war and peace—although he always approaches them with the critical distance afforded by historical sources of inspiration, such as the Dutch Golden Age, or the work of artists like Tintoretto, Caravaggio and especially Edouard Manet, the archetypal peintre de la vie moderne. 

Alongside the classical history of Western painting, film and literature also serve as important pillars in Van Imschoot’s creative universe. By also making them a focal point of the exhibition, we aim to bring Jan Van Imschoot’s world to life within the walls of S.M.A.K. And that world, as the exhibition title suggests, is far from ending. 

Curator: Dieter Roelstraete.