The painterly practice of Koen van den Broek (b. 1973, Bree) is heavily influenced by film and photography. His paintings are based on his own photographs of spatial elements and markings in the (metropolitan) landscape: from coloured curbs or cracks in the road surface to shadows cast by lampposts. Van den Broek purifies his work. He seeks out the tension between figuration and abstraction, but also between traditions within European painting, as represented by Henri Matisse, amongst others, and American painting, as exemplified by Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and Robert Mangold, amongst others. His painting is a search for the essence. We also see this in the extensive Torques series, which was created between 2011 and 2013. For Torque #63 (2013), Van den Broek borrows elements from earlier paintings, the characteristic borders, or curbs, and places them on the image of a torque. The torque refers to the technique of a clutch or a power source that can drive something, both technically and figuratively, and at the same time form a tipping point. Sampling, the layering of different images, is one of the guiding principles within the Torques series. Van den Broek continued to work on this idea in several architectural interventions that arose from the series, such as the facades of De Garage and the AZ Sint-Maarten, both in Mechelen.
