© Kristof Van Heeschvelde – Ik ben Miss

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Kristof Van Heeschvelde (°1979)

As a visual artist, Kristof Van Heeschvelde has been active for 20 years.
Primarily trained as an interior architect, Van Heeschvelde completed his artistic education with a Master in Fine Arts degree which he obtained in 2015 at KASK Ghent.
As an autodidact, it took him quite a while to connect with the professional, academic art field within Belgium.
Until 2018 Van Heeschvelde’s work was represented by Ghent based Jan Dhaese gallery.
Since 2018 however he started to collaborate with Berserk Art Agency, who since then represents his work and helps him to orientate his work towards a next national and international level.
Kristof Van Heeschvelde’s artistic practice researches the condition humaine, our addiction to the self in these narcissistic times of the homo egocentris, who he approaches with compassion and a dash of humor. Van Heeschvelde places his protagonists in an art historical framework and brings together the old masters, the masters of the Flemish school and German neo expressionism to create a time bridging context where the contemporary is interwoven in the past and the future. Trough technical research he creates time, focus and observation in the form of layers of paint. A slow proces juxtaposed to hectic times dictated by slogansvoid of meaning.

Over the years Van Heeschvelde has had a continuous and consistent track of solo exhibitions and group exhibitions. He was part of Watou, the Biennale of Painting (2020), took part in Art On Paper with a group exhibition with Elke Andreas Boon and BilalBahir (2021) and had his first major solo exhibition with ‘Zoete Broodjes’ (2021) at De Ververij (Ronse).

In recent years Van Heeschvelde has broadened his geographical presence towards all parts of Flanders and had some international presentations in Italy and The Netherlands.
In 2022 he was a granted a residency at La Cité Internationale in Paris (France). Kristof Van Heeschvelde’s first publication, ‘Serieus Grappig’/‘Seriously Funny’ will be published in 2023 by Hopper & Fuchs and presented in the same year at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Deurle) and IKOB (Eupen). The text for this publication was written by German art critics Heiko Klaas and Nicole Bussing.

Category: Onboards Biennale 2023

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The work, as always in my body of work, is about several things all at once.

First and foremost it is about being in touch with oneself (as an artist). Being honest with oneself, knowing oneself, recognizing and accepting oneself.
In addition, it is about removing oneself from the throne onto which the artist has been put on. Humanizing, breaking that cult of belief, the religion that surrounds the persona of the artist. I deliver a self-portrait in which I believe as an artist and subsequently crumple it up and seem to have thrown it away, my confident self crisscrossed and zigzagged with folds of paper. Kill your darlings.

Secondly I toy with language, which forms an important element in my body of work. I refuse to ‘explore’, ‘to question’, ‘to research’, instead I use a more direct form of expressing my thoughts and observations, a blue collar directness.
‘Ik Ben Miss’ , which I deliberately misspell, is a text which I use to refer to the current debate on gender, queerness, gender equality.

I approach ‘miss’ in different ways to express my thoughts. I bring the different meanings and layers in direct dialogue with one another.
Am I wrong? Am I wrong should I identify as a woman being a male gender? Am I wrong being a miss and not a mrs? Are we wrong as social species, as humans? The use of the phrase is a refusal to obey to social norms, etiquette that seems to have brought more distress and exclusion than embracement and a feast of diversity.

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