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Dr. Hugo Heyrman

° 1942

Born in Zwijndrecht (Belgium), lives in Antwerp (Belgium).

Dr. Hugo Heyrman, the 'stage-name' of Hugo Heyrman, (born in Zwijndrecht, 1942), is a leading Belgian painter and new-media artist.  He lives and works in Antwerp.

Artist Dr. Hugo Heyrman occupies a unique position in the world of art.  When we survey his full 40-year career in art, we are confronted with an oeuvre continually marked by pioneering acts.  To start with, during the 1960s he worked together with Panamarenko to introduce performance- and conceptual art and actions to the Belgian scene.  Ahead of their time, they were trendsetting artistic projects - for instance, having an auto-free city center - within the framework of what was often an ecological critique. 

Or again, at the beginning of the Seventies, when he led the way with video art.  Some will associate his name with the first digital experiments in art-land, but perhaps are not aware that despite his involvement in these diverse media he still continues to describe himself as a painter.  Even in his painter's palette, right from the outset we recognize that filmic zoom-mode that came to exercise such influence upon an entire generation of Flemish painters in the 1990s.  And when today he enjoys worldwide fame both in the world of academia (with his acute analysis of synesthesia, for example) and in the booming alternative 'web-world' of young digital artists, none would necessarily suspect that omnipresent painter's intuition.

Starting from a lucid artistic thought process, he consistently plays with the potentialities of diverse media to repeatedly provide new stature to what is the essence of representation: the abstraction of each representation.  The oeuvre of Dr. Hugo Heyrman makes a statement on the poetics of painting, on perceptual thought, and on the calling into question of the truth of images.

Exhibitions & Ensembles