Hans Op de Beeck’s first dalliance with a luxury house feels a lot like his art — hushed, contemplative, and slightly under the radar.
Historic luxury handbag maker Delvaux, Belgium’s answer to Hermès, recently tapped him to create a major installation at its Brussels headquarters where its artisans, employees, business partners and invited guests of the brand can take in stands of bamboo, a rotating orrery, two young figures propped at opposite ends of a long lily pond and enigmatic still-life arrangements standing between workbenches.
Now Delvaux is widening the circle, installing Op de Beeck artworks at its Fifth Avenue flagship in New York, though without great fanfare. His ash-gray sculptures, which are disquieting, yet tender and steeped in wonder, go on display from around Nov. 9 until February 2027.
“The characters I depict in sculpture are usually drifting into a melancholic moment,” the Belgian artist explains. “It’s never a spectacular gesture or something dynamic… It’s about letting go, being adrift.”
Op de Beeck works across many mediums: sculptures, installations, video art, photography, animated films, drawings, paintings and short stories. (A primer on his visual universe is only a few clicks away on YouTube, where one can view his mesmerizing “Staging Silence” films for free.)
His dalliance with a luxury brand is new, and he’s the first to admit he’s not a fashion guy — with an important caveat.
“Even though I’m always dressed in lousy clothes,” the 57-year-old says, looking down at his green knit polo and ordinary jeans, “I totally understood the beauty of designing clothes. It’s absolutely fabulous.”
In fact, as part of a sideline doing scenography for opera and dance companies, Op de Beeck has designed costumes for choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s company Eastman — and he relished the exercise.
“Of course I put them in soft gray clothes,” he says sheepishly of that memorable production for the Gothenburg Opera Dance Company. “But there was also milky pink, milky green, mustard — soft colors I combined with the gray outfits.”
Next up, he will create the stage design for two Stravinsky operas, “Oedipus Rex” and “Le Rossignol,” to be directed by Cherkaoui at the Berlin State Opera, scheduled for March. And in December, one of his large-scale watercolors — he works in color sometimes, too — will be unveiled in the subway under Brussels’ main train station, bringing his work to a broader workaday public.
Fashion, or at least clothing, figures in the impassive characters that inhabit his installations. For example, at his first solo show at the Almine Rech gallery in Brussels, on until Nov. 7, the life-size subject of “Cécile & Seascape” wears a dress with a tie neck and a full circle skirt, evoking the 1950s — as does the Delvaux bag propped at her feet: the bestselling Brillant, designed in 1958.
Op de Beeck lauds it as an icon of midcentury design analogous to an Eames chair, and the product of exacting skill and patience. He included it in his art without even telling the brand.
“When I was invited by Delvaux, I somehow instantly felt connected, given that there is a common ground in the silent craft, and old-fashioned things like elegance or refinement that we both cherish — notions that are of importance to talk about life,” he says. “I felt the same need for calm and dedication.”
He relates to the aesthetics of the house, hinged on “a certain Belgian modesty” and tinged with playfulness and a touch of surrealism.
Amid so much spectacle and bombast in the contemporary art world, Op de Beeck’s understated works make suggestions, not pronouncements. He describes his exhibitions as “a zone to share solace.
“I hope you find calm and tranquility and reflection and a certain reflective distance towards — let’s say the anecdotal aspect of life. So something universal,” he says.
The gallerist Rech considers Op de Beeck one of the most talented living Belgian artists, “which is a good enough reason to look at him,” she says. “His world is also very unique, as the DNA of his work mirrors who he is as a human being, drawing from surrealism, still life, landscape, and Dutch art history, which he completely transforms and makes his own, and contemporary.”