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Welcome to the opening Saturday February 28, 4 – 7 PM
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Hilde Overbergh (°1964, Leuven) studied painting in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the 1980s before relocating to Belgium in 1991. She currently resides and works in Leuven. Her work has been shown internationally in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Tehran, and nationally in venues like Kunsthal De Garage (Mechelen), Emergent (Veurne), Art Brussels, and in Whitehouse Gallery (Brussels). It is part of private and public collections such as the Flemish Community, Museum M Leuven, and the Belfius Collection.
Hilde Overbergh’s practice is of a special kind. She starts from painting, but we should no longer think of an easel, a stretcher, brushes and tubes of paint. What she creates are not classical paintings but painterly images, and how are they created? In many different ways, and above all very unconventionally. With Hilde Overbergh, nothing is predetermined; her art is fluid and always in motion. In her painting practice, she never starts with a blank canvas that can be transformed into a world of paint from nothing. On the contrary, she always starts with something that already exists, with a history that is visible in traces of use that tell their own story. She looks around her carefully and embraces what is thrown into her lap, and then she takes up the fight. As if she has to tame what already exists and subject it to the laws of the image that slowly but surely appears before her eyes. Seeing the visual potential of found material is one thing, but confronting and connecting all those existing traces until a new and autonomous image emerges is the real battle.
Stéphanie Baechler (°1983, Fribourg, CH) lives and works in Amsterdam. She has exhibited at Kunstraum Baden (CH), Chamber Gallery New York, Kunsthalle Fri Art Fribourg, Kunsthaus Centre d’art Pasquart Biel, Gewerbemuseum Winterthur, CH in Switzerland, Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam and PLUS-ONE Gallery Antwerp, among others. Her works are in public collections such as HEAD Geneva, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Kunstmuseum [removed] and Kunstmuseum Thurgau and in many private collections.
Whilst in search of texture and form, the works refrain from a nostalgic approach. There is certainly an anxious appraisal unfolding, of digital life and the incursion of screens into our personal domains, but it is less dismissive than curious. Stéphanie doesn’t destroy the cloud(s) but arranges it in different forms: she weaves it a face, casts it, asks what material might hold it down. She moves the online agenda off-screen but doesn’t delete it; its familiar virtual grid materialises as a paravent, a room divide, this temporary architecture assigning it an authoritative substance. She takes the loaded buttons that we click daily – ADD TIME, ADD LOCATION – and articulates them as singular and static in thread. Through these gestures, the show rewires its anxiety into an exploratory material study.
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