Koen Vanmechelen

Breaking the Cage - by Dr Mike Phillips, Tate Consultant

Koen Vanmechelen (pronounced - Koon Vonmekkelin), the Belgian artist selected to create the Arts & Business Award 2008, is one of Europe’s most remarkable and most respected artists. The youngest son in a family of academics, Koen defied family tradition to start his career as a gourmet chef, and twelve years ago, converted his penchant for drawing and sculpting into a full time occupation. Koen’s own development, therefore, is mirrored in his choice of an image – gold and silver eggs, encased in a crystal incubator – a beautiful paradigm of the idea that the award winners exemplify enormous potential talents caught in one stage of the process of nurturing and development.

Typically, Vanmechelen’s imagery, is not a reflection of the real. He presents, instead, a still non-existent living entity which will become real during the course of time; and the work as a whole is a unique mix of different media and materials from highly expressive paintings and drawings, to photography,video,installations, works in glass and a recurring wooden sculpture. What connects all these is his symbolic use of avian life, and the imagery of the egg.
When Koen visited Venice in 1996, he arrived in Murano at the manufactory of Berengo Studios, whose owner Adrian Berengo, is a notable art collector, as well being one of the world’s leading dealers in art objects made in glass. Experimenting with techniques of working in glass launched the artist into a new vista of shapes and colour, focusing the artist’s attention on the egg and its incredible promise as a source of life.
;“I consider my work and everything that exists,” Koen Vanmechelen says,” in Hegelian terms: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. But I don’t know to which of the three categories it belongs.”
After a wide variety of displays throughout most of the world, including an exhibition and address to the World Economic summit at Davos, Koen Vanmechelen’s work is currently displayed in India, South America, east Africa and Europe. In his first major commission in Britain, the works for the Victoria and Albert will go on display in November, to be followed by an exhibition at the Los Angeles Art Fair, and a solo exhibition in Venice during the 2009 Biennale.