Johan Van Mullem

Les Mouvements de L’Âme

Movements of the Soul

Foreword

Hus Gallery and Andipa Gallery are delighted to announce the first major solo exhibition of works by Johan Van Mullem. The exhibition will showcase a selection of works from the ongoing series Movements of the Soul, which the artist has spent the past six years exploring and developing.

Johan Van Mullem is a contemporary artist who creates works that blur the line between the figurative and the surreal. His dream-like paintings occasionally bear traces of Van Mullem’s own physicality, though more often than not his characters are conjured from his imagination without any explanation. Typified by strong, subversive and imaginative elements as well as a bold handling of paint, the current series Movements of the Soul, is an impressively sincere body of work that engulfs the viewer with its haunting power.

Born in Isiro in the Democratic Republic of Congo to Flemish parents, Johan Van Mullem moved frequently whilst growing up due to his father’s profession as a diplomat. As a result, Van Mullem spent seven years living in Tunisia, a country which deeply impacted him:

I have been forever torn between my Flemish roots and that marvelous Mediterranean culture. No other country has had such an impact on me. It was there that I began to draw, to fill my notebooks, and I have never stopped.

However,Van Mullem’s strong personal connection with his art meant that he was reluctant to exhibit his works publicly, and as a result he took to disappearing for long stretches of time to draw in secret. Subsequently, he chose a career as an architect, whilst continuing to express himself artistically in private.

For many years, I lived with that unease…I pretended, I played a role that was not me. It was a very difficult time, perhaps even dramatic, but in my heart I never lost hope, never gave up. I always thought that death was the ultimate freedom before realizing that it solved nothing. I was condemned to live. Thankfully, I was finally able to break the cycle. Today, I am a new man, a sort of rebirth. My work has evolved and the result of that evolution is in my studio. I now have the energy to finally become what I have always been at my core.

Van Mullem’s history is crucial to his work, as there is a suggestion of the incarnated presence of the artist in his creations, his paintings bear the trace of his own physicality and relationship to the materials. Each stroke reasserts this synergy between body and work, as Van Mullem’ marks his paintings with such traces of himself – almost signatures.