Jan Van Imschoot. The End is Never Near

The End Is Never Near gives a comprehensive overview of the oeuvre of Belgian painter Jan Van Imschoot (born 1963, Ghent, Belgium). His work is built up around historical themes from literature and art history, and builds bridges to predecessors such as Caravaggio, Tintoretto, Goya and Manet, amongst others. The artist engages in a continuous dialogue with the past, in which, with a dose of cynicism, he often targets phenomena or fifigures that fifind themselves on the fringes of (contemporary) society. This monograph brings together more than 200 works by Jan Van Imschoot and includes in-depth essays by Selen Ansen, Dieter Roelstraete, Alain Tapié and Philippe Van Cauteren, as well as an extensive conversation between the artist and Hendrik Folkerts. “The eel-soup-without-eel is, so to speak, the price to pay for accessing the knots and complexity of existence. To grasp these knots, it is advisable to close one’s mouth, to open one’s eyes, and to look at the images that are the repository of them. Then it happens that, when looking at an image and its own knots, one sees the revenants: the crowd of past gestures which are given a new life by impregnating themselves with the current times.” --- Selen Ansen