Camiel Van Breedam

About Camiel Van Breedam

Camiel Van Breedam is known for working with materials that have already been used and bear a certain patina. Until today, he has built up a vast and diverse oeuvre of assemblages, collages, reliefs, drawings, paintings, sculptures, and installations. Van Breedam aims to create and highlight texture in his abstract two-dimensional works, integrating different and unusual materials such as metal plates, bicycle chains, or parts of umbrellas. In that sense his artistic practice can be related to matter painting and the Arte Povera movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Encouraged by his mentor, Belgian artist Octave Landuyt, he took part in the Jeune Peinture Belge competition for the first time in 1957, where he received an honorable mention for his 'white' works. From 1958 to 1962, Camiel Van Breedam was a member of G58, a group of artists that aimed to promote experimental, contemporary abstract art through multiple exhibitions in the Hessenhuis in Antwerp.

Instead of deconstruction, Van Breedams creative process is one of 'reconstruction'. His ambition is to breathe new life into everyday objects, creating assemblages as a reaction against throwaway culture and environmental pollution. His work confronts injustice, yet it also bears witness to what endures: a quiet homage to the earth and to a world as it could have been.

Born in Boom in 1936.