Book launch | Charl Van Ark

Uli Langendorf and art historian Frank Maes will speak respectively about the relationship within the working process with the artist and the artist’s career to date. Afterwards, they will discuss the book with publisher Luc Derycke and designer Viktor Van den Braembussche of MER. Books. We will conclude with a signing session and a drink in the entrance hall of S.M.A.K.

The book covers more than four decades of the artist’s unique practice, which moves between painting, photography, and installation. It brings together a wide range of archival material, as well as studio and exhibition images, and features newly written essays by Frank Maes, an introductory text by Patrick Ronse, and contributions from Lisette Pelsers, Philip Peters, and Helga Scholl. The book follows a slow, meticulous, and investigative working process in which small moments accumulate into works that are simultaneously solemn, tactile, and deeply personal.

Biographies

• Charl van Ark (b. Den Helder, 1951, lives and works in Enschede) has created an extensive oeuvre that occupies a unique position within the context of recent and contemporary painting. This singular poetics lies, among other things, in the way the artist generates relationships between the private and the universal, painting and photography, matter and image, object, image and space, the momentary and the lasting, art and archive, the concrete and the abstract, the work and its reworking, and between the artwork and the exhibition as a unique constellation of works.
• Uli Langendorf is an artist, photographer, and 'partner-in-crime' to Charl van Ark. Uli photographs, records, collects, and archives; these photos find their place in a 'logbook'. Additionally, Charl has compiled an archive of all his activities and texts. Together, these components form the Charl van Ark archive, which plays a central role in both his artistic practice and the monograph. The focus of Uli’s talk will be on the book as part of 'object-reality'—as a 'thing in itself' and a 'phenomenon'—the motivations behind creating a book, the creative process of artworks in general and for Charl specifically, and the collaboration between the two.
• Frank Maes is an art historian. He is the artistic director of Emergent in Veurne and publishes on art and architecture. He authored the introductory essay in the monograph and will discuss several key phases and aspects of Charl van Ark’s artistic practice and poetics.