Koen van den Broek Belgium, b. 1973

Koen van den Broek has established his presence by developing his own style crossing the boundary of the figurative and abstract, as one of the leading artists from Belgium, a historically significant repository of paintings over centuries and a pivotal place of the European contemporary art. Van den Broek has developed his own unique sense of abstraction with distinctive oil paintings of the modern urban landscape.

He studied architecture before completing MAs in Painting at several universities, exploring figurations of urban constructions such as signposts, car parks, grid-pattern pedestrian passages, bridges and borderlines of roads easily discovered in cities and their peripheries. ‘The sheer strength of observation’ he has developed as an artist consequently enables him to concentrate on manifesting the traits and significance hidden in symmetric elements and colors of the targets instead of simply regarding them as a substitute framework supporting the city to appropriately function. He has built a particular visual language based upon the observation of building facades and landscapes that are often neglected or forgotten. Being combined with his visual sensibility and original analysis, the landscapes which remain as photographs and their particular tones and uncertainty revealed only through the Polaroid camera not only create a new dimension of elevated sensitivity but provide the higher level of an uplifting idyllic experience difficult to come across within the recent environments of contemporary art.

Koen van den Broek currently lives and works in Antwerp in Belgium. He received a BA in Architect in KU Leuven and studied painting in St. Joost School of Art & Design, Breda, and in Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Belgium. He has participated in exhibitions at De Garage, Mechelen (2020), Museum Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst Ghent (2019, 2011, 2010, 2008), Museum of Modern Art Weserburg, Bremen (2016), Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle (2014), Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (2008). His work is represented in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the USA, S.M.A.K., Museum of Modern Art Antwerp in Belgium, and Leeum Museum of Art, Busan Museum of Art in Korea.