Jan Van Imschoot created the portrait series Louis – Leon – Felix – Yolande – Jan in 2001 for the exhibition Y.E.L.L.O.W. curated by Jan Hoet on behalf of OPZ Geel (public psychiatric care and knowledge centre) and Cultureel Centrum De Werft. The occasion was the 700th anniversary of the unique home nursing care system, in which people with mental health issues live together with people from the city. The artist portrayed four residents of the centre and added a self-portrait as the fifth. In this series, all the subjects are identical. The portrait series subsequently became part of the S.M.A.K. collection in 2003 through a donation.
Jan Van Imschoot (°1963, Ghent) is one of Belgium's most important painters and belongs to a generation of artists who laid the foundations for the critical revaluation of figurative painting in the 1990s. His work occupies a unique place among his professional peers and contemporaries because of the depth of art-historical awareness that underpins his practice. Jan Van Imschoot likes to describe his style as ‘anarcho-baroque’: contemporary baroque with a dose of anarchy. He often uses found images as a starting point, or an event in his environment or society that strikes him.
