Freek Wambacq
° 1978
Lives in Brussels (Belgium), lives in Berlin (Germany).
The works of Freek Wambacq are at once conceptual and material, establishing a critical relationship between the world of art and the world at-large. He uses found objects and materials and brings them to new life in surprising combinations. His contribution to the exhibition Must we teach the blind to see?, consists of a constellation of three autonomous works that relate one to the other. It is a complex story with autobiographical elements and art-historical references.
The starting-point for Freek Wambacq’s installation is a portrait painted by Felix De Boeck in 1955. The portrait in typical De Boeck style of the time, with warm earth colors and circular movements scratched in the paint, is not an exceptional work within the painter’s oeuvre, nor does it seem at home within the exhibition ‘Homage of G58 to the first abstract artists in Belgium’. This insert has personal roots: the portrait in question happens to be of Freek Wambacq’s grandfather. With this painting, Wambacq introduces a figurative element in his installation and alludes to the interchange or appropriation of art works. And, in point of fact, the painting was done as counter gesture for services rendered to De Boeck by grandfather Wambacq.
