TANK Shanghai is pleased to present the Bendt Eyckermans’ exhibition as an expression of support and appreciation for this talented young artist. This is the artist's first solo exhibition in China.
As a Belgian artist who has gained worldwide attention recently, Eyckermans uses his painting practice as a transit point to connect not only to the Flemish artistic tradition that runs deeply in his blood, but also to his personal experiences and fantasies with the spectator. Inspired by this, the exhibition at TANK Shanghai will focus on the essence of daily life, conveying the artist's bright, calm and witty qualities to the spectator.
Eyckermans' creative process is divided into two main stages. The first is the reorganization of "legacy". As the fifth generation of a sculpture family, the artist works in the same studio as his grandfather and father, thus inherits the objects and artworks collected or created by his predecessors. After examining these objects over the years, he rearranges, transforms and uses them as the main subject of his paintings. These deliberately composed "narratives" often reflect his feelings and imagination, transforming people and objects that were not inclined into scenes with personality. In this creative process, the artist dissolves certain events in his life, combining objective objects into an intimate and subjective context.
Then comes the second stage, the transformation of the reconstituted "legacy" into paintings. He continues to find a physical yet poetic expression for the products of the first stage: multi-view compositions, dramatic light and shadows, and stereotypical movements especially imposed on the figures, which seem to stop time in the paintings and carry a great sense of emptiness and uncertainty. At the same time, Eyckermans inherits the realistic and exquisite style of Flemish art, which allows him to keep the painting in a sense of certainty. While the "legacy" that he orchestrates and shapes are deliberately enlarged in the painting, occupying the spectator's attention in an abrupt manner, the rest of the precisely outlined white space remains silent. In this process, the artist's subjective emotions are gradually dissolved by the sense of form contained in his paintings, and the spectator can return to the objective world at any time. However, the artist has used his paintings to inspire a new perspective of viewing, a perspective through which people may have new illusions when they look at everyday life anew.