UNO: Kasper De Vos - Softcover

Vos, Kasper De

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9464363126 ISBN 13: 9789464363128

Publisher: HOPPER&FUCHS, 2025

Synopsis

• Kasper De Vos' sculptures and installations, often comically referencing food culture and found objects, evoke a playful and colorful uncanny world
• In English and French

UNO was made in collaboration with PLUS-ONE Gallery on the occasion of Kapser De Vos’ exhibition ‘Pushing And Pulling The Center To The Mirror’ at M HKA's Inbox.

Kasper De Vos (°1988) gained attention with installations and sculptural interventions that referred to consumerism and its associated food culture in a way that was both humorous and sculptural. Often, his sculptures combine found objects or materials with modeled elements. His sculptures and installations seem to stem from a kind of tactile and visual pleasure, a play of formal and substantive associations and a mild form of humor that takes the form of an open, playful, imaginative dance with materials, techniques, things and thoughts. His work evokes stories without being illustrative or pedantic. It is a kind of thinking with shapes, which in turn makes us think and dream. Surprising, inventive, generous, plastic, virtuosic, open and oneiric.

In English and French.

About this title

About the Author

In his studio, Kasper De Vos’ collages, drawings and sculptures built a colorful and rather uncanny environment where vibrant imaginary landscapes were deeply rooted down by everyday absurdities. A visual storyteller, De Vos utilizes serendipity, surprise and salvaged social remnants as key elements in his process. Materials and idea are gathered on the natural route of any given day, and classical sculptural forms (such as base, bust, and body) are incorporated into odd combinations of contemporary throwaways. 

A bulk of his artistic production, including miniature utopian mock-ups and works on paper, are classified as studies for future sculptures. Everything is material for something else and these sculptures tend to be constructed from found and frequently perishable materials; leftovers that De Vos transforms to make humorous reflections on the awkward intersections between culture and consumerism. Sandwiches become tables, plastic water bottle crates act as the base of temples, and raves are reduced to totemic systems (what de Vos called “Native Kitsch”) as elements from the artist’s environment are removed from their habitat and reassembled. Throughout his practice, De Vos flirts playfully with filth, cloaking serious social issues with a light-hearted type of Trojan horse aesthetic where basic colors and forms carry questions about materials, motivations and social phenomena. He is a sculptor who seems to want to give away an object’s secrets.

As recurring elements in his daily routine, folklore and food play a significant role in his practice and the artist’s fascination with the latter goes beyond eating, leading him to activities like dumpster diving and selling vegetables every Friday in the market place. These experiences offered reminders that what we eat is usually coupled to what we buy and that while our dinner may speak to familiarity, folklore, pleasure and cultural pride, it also addresses economic and social contradictions like starvation and systemic overproduction that further contributes to mountains and mountains of waste.  

From the Back Cover

That long, long path that runs across the marshes and through the woods, who made it?

–Knut Hamsun - How it grew

The leitmotif of this oeuvre is undoubtedly nature. The romance of the artist who goes out and learns to look in the woods, but, as mentioned, takes his findings back to the civilised world. Even his food pieces began with an epiphany he experienced during a tree felling course in which a pine branch revealed itself to him as roast chicken. In addition, nature, the open air, is also the ideal environment (the world a pedestal) to present this work. When it is not on sale in shops, it often takes its place among the trees in Middelheim Park or on the Bijloke site where he went to school. Nature is a primaeval material that must be developed again and again in new ways. Be it the drawings of trees he brought back from Spain or the stone table that he and his compagnon de route Liesbeth Henderickx left behind on the Swedish coast. Human beings leave their mark. The artist does this in a more stylised way. The boy scout of yesteryear has expanded his survival arsenal. No longer does he merely tie knots in rope or know how to light a fire. This book is proof that, over the past ten years, he has succeeded in connecting his fantasies and the images he gathers together into ever more overtly poetic gestures that can be transported both nimbly and conveniently in a backpack made of bark. In the hope of getting them worn out in the inhabited world.

–Michaėl Van Remoortere

Edition details

• Publisher: HOPPER&FUCHS
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9464363126
• ISBN 13: 9789464363128
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208