De Brock Gallery (Zeedijk)

De Brock is pleased to present Shape of Color, a group show including work by Bernard Frize, Imi Knoebel, Robert Mangold and Landon Metz. Color and form have long occupied a central place in the language of abstraction, each continually redefining the other. Often misunderstood as merely something applied to a surface, color itself can become structure, define space, and determine the very shape of a work. This exhibition traces four distinct approaches to abstraction in which color is not descriptive, but constructive. Across generations, these artists have each challenged the conventional relationship between color and composition. Bernard Frize approaches painting from a unique perspective, embracing predetermined processes that allow gesture and chance to coexist. His luminous, interwoven brushstrokes produce surfaces in which color emerges through method rather than expression, revealing painting as an event rather than an image. For Imi Knoebel, color becomes inseparable from the object itself. His rigorously composed works dissolve the boundary between painting and sculpture, using geometry and material to construct a physical presence that extends beyond the pictorial plane. Robert Mangold further expanded painting's formal vocabulary through shaped canvases, geometric structures, and subtle chromatic relationships that invite slow, contemplative looking. Representing a younger generation, Landon Metz continues this investigation through fluid, biomorphic forms that hover between figure and ground. His restrained compositions emphasize rhythm, repetition, and the quiet emotional resonance of color, demonstrating how abstraction continues to evolve while remaining rooted in fundamental questions of perception. Despite their differing methodologies, all four artists share an enduring commitment to abstraction as a language of visual experience rather than representation. Their works reject illusion in favor of presence, asking viewers to engage directly with scale, rhythm, proportion, and chromatic relationships. Here, color is not merely seen - it is felt as weight, movement, balance, and space. Rather than presenting a linear history, the exhibition brings together works that resonate across time, demonstrating how each artist has redefined the possibilities of color as form. Together, they remind us that abstraction remains one of contemporary art's most vital arenas for experimentation, where the simplest elements (line, shape, and color) continue to generate endlessly complex experiences.

De Brock presents [LINK text='Julian Opie' href='https://www.debrockgallery.com/artists/julian-opie'] ’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, marking twenty-five years of creative collaboration. Spread across the gallery’s three spaces, the exhibition features figurative works from the artist’s Angel series, as well as new hand-painted portraits inspired by a recent trip to India. A graduate of Goldsmiths in the early 1980s, where he studied under Sir Michael Craig Martin, Opie’s multidisciplinary practice remains rooted in drawing while repeatedly encompassing large-scale sculptural installations, architectural interventions, moving-image LED lightboxes and two-dimensional works accomplished through advanced print-making processes. Instantly identifiable for their simplified, stylistic depictions of everyday existence, Opie’s oeuvre has long engaged with the language of pictograms, from the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs to the emojis that punctuate current digital communication. His portraiture in particular, a practice initiated in the mid-1990’s following inspiration from the silhouetted symbols found on lavatory doors and road signage, merges the art historical canon of contrapposto-stanced, classical sculptures and staged, society genre paintings with contemporary street styles and digital method of making. For his recent Angel series, Opie turned his attention once again to the figures and foot traffic of his hometown, London. Following repeated sessions of people watching and photographing passers-by on a busy North London high-street, a suite of forty striding strangers were selected and translated into his signature, universal style. Presented in naturalistic colour palettes but with a high-gloss mirrored finish, each retains the energy of the artist’s original street-side observations while being immediately elevated from ordinary individual to artistic subject. Where previously Opie’s distilled depictions have appeared self-contained, as if limited to the confines of their picture planes, here white backgrounds blend with white gallery walls as if to free the figures, giving each the illusory ability to amble around and explore the exhibition space. Alongside, Opie exhibits for the first time large-scale, hand-painted portraits. Initiated by a fleet of faces captured on a recent trip to India, his front-on, floating heads are reduced to their purest physical form, practically symmetrical if not for their separate hair styles. Employing a limited, bold colour palette borrowed from vibrant Hindu iconography and the brightly painted facades of houses in Southern India, each emblematic outline is randomly allocated a three-colour combination, as the artist begins to entertain the possibilities of emerging AI technology to entirely outsource portrait production.