"Drifting"
PILEVNELI Dolapdere
October 8 - November 22, 2020
PILEVNELI is pleased to present “Drifting” - a new solo exhibition by Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck between October 8 – November 22, 2020.
In his second solo exhibition at PILEVNELI, Op de Beeck, whose monotone, grey, figurative sculptures we are familiar with, presents a new body of works to be exhibited in Turkey for the first time. The exhibition focuses on the feeling of drifting and floating aimlessly, to surrender to something greater, to fate, to what cannot be controlled and furthermore, to the feeling of someone’s attention drifting off involuntarily and daydreaming.
Op de Beeck associates ‘drifting’ with sleep and letting go of the real world, to transition to the world of the dream... Ultimately, drifting also refers to an everlasting passing, meaning death.
The work ‘My bed a raft, the room the sea, and then I laughed some gloom in me’ (2019), which resonates artist’s thoughts and the main theme of the exhibition, depicts a young female figure asleep in her bed that hovers above a raft, which, in turn, is afloat on a lily-pond. As the raft has no sail or tiller, it is controlled by chance and natural elements, becoming a fitting metaphor for surrender. By the side of the bed are books, candy, a glass of water and sleeping pills. Butterflies, representations of souls in Ancient Greece, emblems of mortality and transience, flutter about.
Sleeping and dreaming are conditions that frequently recur in Hans Op de Beeck’s work. The artist encourages the audience to submit to their own dreams through imagination. His works point to man’s drifting to sleep and away from his reality, and to the breeze of an inevitible death which from time to time represents a state of ‘transition’.
The exhibition can be viewed at PILEVNELI Dolapdere.