Koen van den Broek: Freedom of Shadows

Gallery Baton is pleased to present Freedom of Shadows, a solo exhibition by Koen van den Broek (b. 1973) from February 27 to March 29, 2025 in its Hannam-dong space, Seoul. Koen van den Broek is an artist hailing from Belgium, a country that has been a key center of European contemporary art and a historical treasure trove of contemporary painting. Working in a painting style that blurs the boundaries of the figurative and abstract, he has established a firm position for himself internationally as an artist. This exhibition offers viewers an opportunity to observe his more rigorous approach to the formal aspects he has pursued over the years, as well as his journey of exploring the possibilities of new creative techniques.

Van den Broek majored in architecture before completing a master’s program in painting at the prestigious including Higher Institute for Fine Arts, Belgium. The forms that he explores are elements found in cities and their surroundings: street signs, parking structures, grid-patterned sidewalks, piers, dividing lines, and so forth. As a full-time artist, van den Broek has honed unique powers of pure observation. Rather than seeing his subjects merely as auxiliary structures supporting the functions of the city, he encourages the viewer to focus on the significance of the color sense and geometric elements within them and the ways in which they manifest their uniqueness.

The motif for this series-based exhibition relates to lingering shadows that he has perceived as afterimages of powerful memories. His seven-part “S” series (with works whose titles all begin with the letter “S”) shows shadows of buildings falling over nearby roads, elongated by the afternoon sunlight. Images that occupy nearly the entire upper part of the work imbue an illusory weight to the painting while alluding to the vague shape of a building. This weight is compounded by the thick textures of actual traffic paint and tar—which the artist is using for the first time in recent years—to create something that seems to heighten the late afternoon stillness and the delicate sense of anticipation for the setting sun. A dazzling tension is evoked between image and backdrop, which seem to face each other while crowded as tightly as rugby players in a scrum, only to be broken up at times by sudden bursts of thin lines in complementary colors and clusters of paint particles.

Koen van den Broek once believed that being an artist meant achieving freedom. But since his realization that this freedom arises only temporarily through the realization of his artistic ideals, he has admitted to harboring endless questions about his own ideals and yearnings as an artist. His desire to organically integrate his memories and perceptions of roads in his work has led him to embrace the materiality of industrial paints and tar and apply them within his creations. Imbuing freedom in shadows, he infuses fantasy into the anonymous urban spaces when the sunlight and air briefly linger.

Koen van den Broek (b. 1973) currently lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. He received a BA in Architect in Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and studied painting in St. Joost School of Art & Design, Breda, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Belgium. His solo exhibition has been held in major museums in Europe, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (2024), Ludwig Museum (2024), Kunstmuseum Magdeburg (2023), Weserburg-Museum of Modern Art (2016), S.M.A.K. the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent (2010), Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (2005; 2009), Bonnefantenmuseum (2008). His work is represented in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the USA; S.M.A.K., Museum of Modern Art Antwerp, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Belgium; Astrup Fearnley Museet in Norway; and Leeum Museum of Art, Busan Museum of Art in Korea.