This fall, Hans Op de Beeck returns to Brussels with an exhibition that seems to ask for something increasingly difficult to find: time. Opening September 10 at Almine Rech Brussels, “Vanishing Point” brings together new sculptures and an animated film in the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery—and his first solo presentation in Brussels in more than 15 years. On view through November 7, the exhibition arrives following the success of “Nocturnal Journey,” presented at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp in 2025, extending the Belgian artist’s long-running exploration of memory, imagination, stillness, and the strange emotional charge of ordinary things.
A Horizon Between the Visible and the Unknown
Portrait of Hans Op de Beeck, 2025 / © Hans Op de Beeck – Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech – Photo: Hugard & Vanoverschelde.
Hans Op de Beeck, “Pond (Roe Deer),” 2026, mixed Media 50 x 200 x 200 cm, (c) Hans Op de Beeck, photo by Hugard & Vanoverschelde, courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech.
The exhibition takes its title from the vanishing point of classical perspective: the place on the horizon where parallel lines appear to converge and three-dimensional space begins to slip from view. For Op de Beeck, however, the concept is also an existential one. “Vanishing Point” imagines a threshold between what can be measured and understood and what remains elusive—a movement from the concrete toward the abstract, the mental, and perhaps even the spiritual.
That sense of transition has long animated Op de Beeck’s multidisciplinary practice. Working across sculpture, installation, film, drawing, photography, and watercolor, the artist constructs highly detailed environments that feel at once familiar and slightly displaced. A room, landscape, table, carousel, or solitary figure can appear almost perfectly recognizable, only to become uncanny through staging, monochrome surfaces, or subtle shifts in scale and context.
For “Vanishing Point,” visitors will enter an immersive environment populated by furniture, sculptures, and decorative objects, with the atmosphere of a Wunderkammer—or cabinet of curiosities—somewhere between an old natural history museum and a private world of accumulated memories. The exhibition brings together culture and nature in an eclectic, anachronistic arrangement, encouraging visitors to move through a space where no single narrative fully resolves.
Hans Op de Beeck Suspends Figures in Time
Hans Op de Beeck, “Autumn Pond,” 2025, mixed media, 115 x 115 x 13.5 cm, (c) Hans Op de Beeck, photo by Hugard & Vanoverschelde, courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech.
Hans Op de Beeck, “Orrery (Loss),” 2025, mixed media, 232 x 130 x 130 cm, (c) Hans Op de Beeck, photo by Hugard & Vanoverschelde, courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech.
Among the new works are contemplative human figures that embody the exhibition’s interest in interiority and suspension. Cécile, a life-sized sculpture from 2026, depicts a young woman seated on a chaise longue, apparently absorbed in thought. Nearby, a small deer rests on the furniture, while a framed Seascape hangs on the wall. A handbag placed on the floor adds another detail from everyday life, yet the entire scene is rendered in Op de Beeck’s distinctive monochromatic palette, transforming a domestic moment into something dreamlike and almost theatrical.
The exhibition will also include a meditating teenage boy and a toddler caught in a melancholy moment, extending the artist’s fascination with figures who seem to exist outside ordinary action. Rather than offering dramatic events, these works linger in pauses: moments when nothing appears to be happening and yet something emotionally charged remains just beneath the surface.
Other works on view include Small Blue Still Life (1), Tangerines, Autumn Pond, and Pond (Roe Deer), demonstrating the breadth of Op de Beeck’s attention—from intimate still-life arrangements to expansive natural scenes. Orrery (Loss), meanwhile, points toward the artist’s recurring interest in larger systems of time, movement, and disappearance.
Color—or rather, its removal—remains central to this visual world. Op de Beeck frequently renders sculptures and installations in shades of grey, anthracite, and chalk white, withdrawing familiar objects from immediate reality and placing them somewhere between memory and imagination. The effect can make even the most ordinary scene feel spectral, as though it belongs simultaneously to the past, the future, and an imagined present.
Why “Vanishing Point” Matters Now
Hans Op de Beeck, “Small Blue Still Life (1), 2026, mixed media, 41 x 52 x 21 cm, (c) Hans Op de Beeck, photo by Hugard & Vanoverschelde, courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech.
Hans Op de Beeck, “Tangerines, 2026, polyester, wood and coating, 28 x 35 x 5 cm, (c) Hans Op de Beeck, photo by Hugard & Vanoverschelde, courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech.
At a moment defined by speed, constant images, and increasingly fragmented attention, Op de Beeck’s work proposes another mode of looking. His installations do not reveal themselves all at once. They encourage the viewer to linger, notice small details, and remain within uncertainty rather than immediately searching for an explanation.
This resistance to instant consumption gives “Vanishing Point” particular resonance now. The exhibition’s animated film, also titled Vanishing Point, develops this interest through a slow, almost hypnotic sequence in which spaces appear and disappear, objects shift, and settings gradually transform. Time itself seems to move toward a horizon that can never quite be reached.
Op de Beeck has built an international career around these suspended worlds, with recent solo exhibitions at KMSKA in Antwerp, Powerlong Museum in Shanghai, the Nordic Watercolour Museum in Skärhamn, Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort, and Amos Rex in Helsinki. His works are also held in collections including MuHKA, S.M.A.K., the Kröller-Müller Museum, Albertina, and the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique.
Yet there is something especially meaningful about this return to Brussels. More than 15 years after his last solo exhibition in the city, Op de Beeck arrives with a body of work concerned precisely with what changes, fades, and remains. “Vanishing Point” does not offer disappearance as an ending. Instead, it imagines the horizon as a place of projection—where memory, desire, and imagination continue to gather, even as the world in front of us begins to dissolve.
Hans Op de Beeck, “Cêcile,” 2026, mixed media, “Seascape,” 2022, polyester, metal, and coating, (c) Hans Op de Beeck, photo by Hans Op de Beeck Studio, courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech.