BASE-ALPHA GALLERY

KATLEEN VINCK

The starting point for Katleen Vinck’s sculptural work is her extreme fascination for architecture; its history, its meaning, its materials, and its technical intricacies. Architecture has accompanied and sustained humans throughout their history. Its foundations are often the last, imperishable remainders of long-lost civilizations. Archaeological research helps us discover our past, but also offers important reflections about the future. 

It is precisely on the verge of these universes, in the field tension between a scientifically verified past and an imagined future, that Vinck’s sculptures are situated. Some shapes might remind us of a tank or a UFO floating through the exhibition space; others seem to refer to a kind of ‘cyber-urban’ architecture. Her titles rarely give any clues. They are rather a way for her to toy with the viewer’s perception and thus to keep our imagination away from one clear-cut meaning.  

The materials she uses, such as concrete and clay, might appear cold and silent, but their aura is buzzing with potential, with layers of time, with an ambition and expectation for transformation. What Vinck desires to show is not the loss, but the beauty of what is temporary. Everything transforms into something new overtime, carrying layers of past lives. Her works are rarely finished constructions or singular monuments, but rather appeal to that translucid, ungraspable moment of transformation – the blurry instant of crossing meanings and concept. 

Tamara Beheydt