Paul Van Hoeydonck (1925) - Suite Olympic Centennial 1992

Paul Van Hoeydonck (Antwerp, October 8, 1925) is a Belgian painter and sculptor known for being the only artist to have a work of his on the Moon, The Fallen Astronaut, placed on August 1, 1971 in its place by the Apollo 15 mission, in memory of the victims of the space race.
Title of the work, “Olympic Centennial Suite 1992”, IOC sponsorship
Original Graphic Work numbered and hand signed by the artist.
Van Hoeydonck graduated in Art History and Archeology in his hometown, Antwerp (Belgium) . Rooted in the period of Pop-Art, Op-art and Nouveau Realisme, he managed to conceive a completely new work with his Space-Art. Throughout his career, Van Hoeydonck remained outside the dominant styles and movements, and in his more than 50 years of activity, concern for man and his interaction with space has been fundamental in his work.
During the 1950s, Van Hoeydonck worked as a geometric abstractionist. Color was high on his agenda, and collages of the period often delved into three dimensions. From this abstraction of concretely constructed reality, Van Hoeydonck moved to extreme simplification in his white toy reliefs of 1955-56. Movement and the intervention of light gradually led him from spatial sensitivity to space art during the early 1960s.
Among his most important works of the 1960s are the series Cities of the Future, Spacescapes and White Planets (Planetscapes) , which contained works in line with the mood of the race to conquer space, which dominated the world at that time. epoch. From a young age, Van Hoeydonck has harbored a special interest in the moon and outer space. He started making unpopulated planets in 1959 and then made Constellations, Nebulae and Stardust with different shapes and materials. By shooting synthetic paint onto the panel, and letting the paint create its own spontaneous chemical reactions, Van Hoeydonck wanted to imitate the effect of a meteorite crashing into the planet. His brushless technique is among the revolutionary ZERO techniques of the time, such as slashing the canvas (Fontana) , stippling (Bonalumi, Piene and Uecker) and burning (Aubertin) .
As the public did not understand these exceptional works, Van Hoeydonck reacted with his series of so-called Boîtes à monocles, in which boxes intended for precious objects were filled with glasses, a provocative and humorous reference to people's “blindness. ” During the period 1960-1962, Van Hoeydonck continued with the found object. After the “Boîtes à Monocles”, he made “Bonshommes” from prefabricated objects, often found in the port of Antwerp. These robotic creatures, made up of wooden planks and metal objects, are prefigurations of his later “Homo Spatiens” and are contemporaries of the humanoid bronze creatures of the British sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi.
Although Van Hoeydonck was never officially a member of the Zero group, founded in Dusseldorf in 1957, he was always invited to exhibit at the group's exhibitions in Germany and Holland. In 1958, Van Hoeydonck was a co-founder of the G58 group, which exhibited its works at the Hessenhuis in Antwerp. Van Hoeydonck was also the driving force behind the historic exhibition “Vision in Motion, Movement in Vision” in 1959, which brought together the artists Yves Klein, Heinz Mack, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Soto and Van Hoeydonck. In the summer of 1962, Van Hoeydonck was guest of honor at the XXXI Venice Biennale.
Van Hoeydonck's work was always ahead of its time. In 1990, Whitford Fine Art organized a groundbreaking solo exhibition of Van Hoeydonck's work from the 1950s, but it is today that Van Hoeydonck has finally reclaimed his place in art history following the well-received retrospective exhibition at the Félix Art Museum of Drogenbos, Brussels, in 2011.