For the KMSKA, visual artist Hans Op de Beeck creates one large, experience-oriented route through a fictional, mysterious place. It is a kind of enigmatic, dark evocation of a deserted nocturnal park, in which all kinds of images of characters, still lifes, objects, animals, architectural constructions and natural elements merge into a strange world.

With the title, ‘Nachtreis’, the artist wants to invite the visitor to make a journey, physically and mentally, in time and space, in an environment that carries the silence, the meditative but also the darkness and latent derailment of the night. He creates a journey along recognizable elements and emotions, but which can also take us to the unknown and subconscious. 

Life-size sculptures alternate with scaled-down and enlarged images, as in a surreal dream in which things often appear in many proportions mixed together. The characters reflect different phases of life, emotions and our daily human rituals, while the animals, objects and architecture evoke environments with which the viewer can identify and thus also stir up very personal memories and affections.

What connects everything here is that the artist created all the works mainly in grey, black and white, making them appear petrified or covered in a layer of dust, still and frozen in time. 

All components in this fictional world, rich in references, refer to different time periods and socio-cultural environments and are very diverse in their aesthetics. By working anachronistically and eclectically, the artist wants to relativize time, space, formal language and status and at the same time wants to arrive at the universal and timeless essence of what binds us in our humanity. At the same time, we also find numerous art historical references to the collection of the KMSKA and how similar themes have been depicted by artists there over the centuries.

The exhibition is supplemented with a separate projection space for Op de Beeck’s art film ‘Staging Silence (3)’ (2019), and his latest animated film ‘Vanishing Point’ (2024), both entirely in the spirit of a nocturnal journey.