Koen van den Broek: Skin of the Earth

About the Exhibition

The Jeonnam Museum of Art presents 《Skin of the Earth》, an exhibition illuminating the work of Belgian painter Koen van den Broek (b. 1973). Having turned to painting after training in architecture and engineering, he has spent the past 25 years persistently gazing at the margins of urban infrastructure — roads, sidewalks, intersections, parking lots — taking as his central painterly subject the surface of the ground formed by cracks in asphalt, lane markings, curbs, and shadows. Based on photographs he takes himself while traveling, Van den Broek translates the framing and viewpoints of photography and film into painting. He sometimes uses actual road-construction tar and traffic-marking paint on canvas, revealing the point where artificial materials meet the natural environment through layers of brushwork and matter. This exhibition overlays the images he has photographed and painted onto the concrete ground of Jeonnam's coasts and tidal flats, concrete embankments, and asphalt roads.