Philippe Vandenberg

de Brigitte Kölle, Felicity Lunn

The Hamburger Kunsthalle is showing the most extensive retrospective to date of the work of Belgian artist Philippe Vandenberg (1952-2009), comprising some 80 paintings and over 120 drawings and prints. This is the first show devoted to Vandenberg in Germany, inviting visitors to discover an important artist who may be unfamiliar to them. Highly acclaimed in his home country of Belgium, Vandenberg produced a radical and unsparing œuvre that is just now achieving greater international prominence. The title of the exhibition, Kamikaze, describes the artist's drastic working methods and results, a basic precept of which is that creativity is only possible through the deliberate destruction of what has gone before. Going beyond any single artistic "style", Vandenberg created complex images of our times which resonate with both contemporary pertinence and existential significance. The majority of the works on loan came from the artist's estate and are now being presented to the public for the first time. Exhibition: Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany (16.11.2018 - 24.02.2019).