Willem Oorebeek - OBSTAKLES

WIELS presents  'OBSTAKLES', a major survey exhibition of Willem Oorebeek (b. 1953, NL), a Dutch-born artist who has been living and working in Brussels since the 1990s. 

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For many decades, parallel to what the “pictures” generation investigated, Oorebeek has explored the impact of images and the erosion and inflation of the viewing experience caused by mass reproduction. 

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The survey exhibition features around 40 work groups, spanning from the 1980s and 1990s to new productions that engage spatially with the architecture. Spread across two floors, 'OBSTAKLES' highlights Oorebeek’s in-depth exploration of authorship and aura through mass-produced images and reproduction techniques of appropriation. 

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Through elaborate processes of repetition and superimposition, in a quasi-painterly approach, his work thematizes media forms of representation and the viewer’s possibilities of perception. Like a palimpsest, the images exist in a constant cycle of erasure and reemergence, with their original source resisting and disrupting, never fully succumbing to obliteration. 

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At the core of his work stands the human figure, serving as a vehicle to investigate the politics of the image, the allure of icons, and the humor and derision that arise from their overexposure in public consciousness. 

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