Koen van den Broek is an architect at heart. This is never far from his paintings, as the artist's work primarily questions man's architectural interventions in the landscape. By reducing images to their essence, the artist explores a language close to abstraction. He seeks anonymity, the general rather than the particular. His relationship with photography is essential. His paintings are like anti-images, reactions against the recordings of the camera.
In 2010, at the request of the Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Koen Van den Broek created a painting entitled “Madonna,” which is an exploration of Jean Fouquet's Virgin and Child (1452). True to his approach, he extracts the main lines in a recognizable sketch that tends towards abstraction, while paying homage to the original.
Since then, the painter has appropriated this work, reworking it as a formal motif in an ongoing series of paintings. “Mistress,” the most recent in this series, goes further by integrating several of the formal motifs he has worked with in recent years into a single composition.
