Willem Oorebeek, OBSTAKLES
1.02—27.04.2025, WIELS, Brussels, BE
For many decades, parallel to what the “pictures” generation investigated, Willem Oorebeek (b.1953, NL), has explored the impact of images and the erosion and inflation of the viewing experience caused by mass reproduction. The survey exhibition features around 40 work groups, spanning from the 1980s and 1990s to new productions that engage spatially with the architecture. Spread across two floors, OBSTAKLES highlights Oorebeek’s in-depth exploration of authorship and aura through mass-produced images and reproduction techniques of appropriation. Through elaborate processes of repetition and superimposition, in a quasi-painterly approach, his work thematizes media forms of representation and the viewer’s possibilities of perception. Like a palimpsest, the images exist in a constant cycle of erasure and reemergence, with their original source resisting and disrupting, never fully succumbing to obliteration. At the core of his work stands the human figure, serving as a vehicle to investigate the politics of the image, the allure of icons, and the humor and derision that arise from their overexposure in public consciousness.
— Executive curator: Pauline Hatzigeorgiou
— With the generous support of: Mondriaan Fonds
— And the support of: Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Belgium.
The exhibition is accompanied by a book edited by Will Holder and Willem Oorebeek, published by Roma Publications and supported by WIELS, Mondriaan Fonds, Monolith BV and gallery dépendance