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Willem Oorebeek - OBSTAKLES’

  • Exhibitions
For many decades, Willem Oorebeek has explored how mass reproduction of images impacts the viewing experience. Through elaborate processes of repetition and superimposition, in a quasi-painterly approach, his work examines forms of representation and the viewer’s possibilities of perception.

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. 

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. 

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.