Joris Van de Moortel is a visual artist, performer and musician. He develops his work around the characteristics of his performances or the elements that inhabit his daily life.

The material elements of these productions are broken and dissected to create new forms, informing future creations (at the end of his concerts, he breaks instruments, throws paint at cables). The debris is recovered and inspires the creation of new work, thus maintaining a cycle of destruction and rebirth from chaos.

Literally box-objects, these works are hybrids between a photograph, a painting and the ready-made.

In Office Framing, he deconstructs the surface of an office by arranging different photographs of the architectural space and adding material elements such as an iron grid. Neon is used as paint strokes, placed freely on a complex construction with its play of very aesthetic perspectives.

This combination of materials (neon, wood, plexiglass, aluminium, steel, black and white photography, Duratrans prints, scotch tape) is in reference to memories (as the title indicates, it is 10 years after). It blurs the lines between the nature of the work. Between painting, sculpture or photography, the artist refers to the dream of a Gesamtkunstwerk, as extolled by 19th century German Romanticism.

This concept of a total work of art, and to bring forth a work that would blend all the artistic disciplines, inscribes Joris Van de Moortel into an artistic tradition, even if the artist also appears innovative and iconoclastic in every sense of the term.

Born in 1983 in Gent, Joris Van de Moortel lives and works in Antwerp. He was a graduate of HISK (Higher Institute of Fine Arts, Gent) in 2009 and resident of the Künstelerhaus Bethanien in Berlin in 2012 and 2013. He has participated in numerous significant collective exhibitions: notably at Mac’s (Belgium 2016), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Germany 2015), Villa Empain (Belgium 2015), the Palais de Tokyo (France 2014), the Maison Particulière (Belgium 2013) and SMAK (Belgium 2013), as well as several outstanding solo exhibitions.