Koen van den Broek: The Skin of the Earth

Jeonnam Museum of Art presents The Skin of the Earth, the first solo exhibition by Belgian painter Koen van den Broek at a public museum in Asia. Bringing together works that span the artist’s sustained investigation of roads, pavements, intersections, parking lots, and other peripheral structures of the urban environment, the exhibition examines how the ground—marked by cracks, curbs, shadows, road lines, and worn asphalt—emerges as both a pictorial subject and a field of historical, material, and perceptual inscription.

Trained in architecture and engineering before turning to painting, van den Broek has developed a distinctive pictorial language over the past 25 years. His paintings often begin with photographs taken during his travels, yet they do not function as straightforward records of place. Instead, the artist translates the framing, cropping, and perspectival structures of photography and cinema into compositions in which anonymous urban fragments become charged arrangements of lines, planes, rhythms, and color fields. Lane markings cut off at the edge of the frame, diagonal sidewalks, shadows cast across asphalt, and boundaries that continue beyond the picture plane generate a tension between the documentary and the abstract. The exhibition also presents works from van den Broek’s collaboration with John Baldessari, extending its inquiry into the relationship between painting, photography, cinematic framing, and the transformation of images through painterly intervention.

Van den Broek’s work extends a lineage of modern and contemporary painting while redirecting its attention toward overlooked surfaces of the built environment. The structurally organized landscapes of Paul Cézanne, the solitary urban and interior scenes of Edward Hopper, and the photo-based painting of Luc Tuymans form part of the broader visual field against which his practice may be read. Yet van den Broek shifts the emphasis away from the monumental landscape or the inhabited cityscape, focusing instead on the ground beneath vision: the road, the curb, the edge, the trace, and the surface.

The title The Skin of the Earth points to this specific register of looking. In an age marked by climate crisis, environmental change, and renewed attention to the material conditions of the ground, van den Broek’s paintings do not turn to sublime nature. They focus on the granular layers of the urban surface: worn asphalt, overpainted traffic lines, stains left by rain, soil exposed through fissures, and the unstable meeting point between artificial construction and the natural environment. At times, the artist incorporates materials such as tar and road-marking paint—substances used in actual road construction—into the surface of the canvas. Through these material gestures, painting becomes a means of reading the traces of time, force, erosion, and repair inscribed upon the earth’s constructed skin.

Presented in Korea, this perspective resonates with histories of land shaped by development, industrialization, urban expansion, and infrastructural transformation. Roads, vacant lots, redevelopment zones, parking areas, construction sites, and reclaimed land have long functioned as thresholds where nature and artificial systems meet, and where social, political, and economic forces become visible on the surface. Seen through this context, van den Broek’s paintings suggest not only images of the urban margin, but also a broader “painting of the ground”—one that asks how the surface beneath us records the pressures of modern life.

By presenting van den Broek’s work within a public museum in Asia for the first time, Jeonnam Museum of Art situates his practice within a wider conversation on painting, infrastructure, land, and perception. The Skin of the Earth invites viewers to reconsider the ordinary surfaces of the city not as neutral backgrounds, but as active sites where image, matter, memory, and environment converge.

Koen van den Broek (b. 1973, Bree, Belgium) lives and works in Antwerp. Over the past two decades, his work has been presented in major museum exhibitions across Europe, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Ludwig Museum Koblenz, Kunstmuseum Magdeburg, Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, and Bonnefantenmuseum.

Organized by : Jeonnam Museum of Art / With the support of: Gallery Baton.