photo: Sam Cornette
Belgian artist Gijs Vanhee, with his distinctive graphic style, metaphorically exposes the themes we neglect in our everyday lives. The freedom we dream of and the reality we neglect are intertwined in the paintings of Belgian-born muralist Gijs Vanhee. The artist is coming to Sofia to create a mural in the city center at the invitation of the Visionary Foundation and as part of Belgian Days 2022. Gijs Vanhee is an illustrator who became passionate about street art in his teens. Now he is a popular and active mural artist of the street art scene in Europe, who develops whole stories with his interesting characters on walls of urban space, paper, canvas, and digitally.
Narrative drawings in which humans with the head of a bird play a leading role. The search for freedom forms the common thread throughout his work, as well as the balance between nature and society. His works are an invitation to take time to stop and look around, to search in the details for stories or questions about us humans or how we are drifted away from who we are. His drawings have a very recognizable style, often in black and white or with limited use of color. With murals, the elements or textures present usually play an important role in the work. This visual language becomes a recognizable style in black and white that speaks loudly on crucial topics that people, preoccupied with the "important" matters of their daily lives, neglect.
Often, Gijs portrays those bird-human characters in situations that question our very nature as human beings and how we continually drift away from our true nature, distracted by routine tasks. Yet we continue to dream and crave freedom, ironically represented through the wingless bird in a human body in his paintings.
The visual artist begins the extensive work of painting the mural on Monday, 18.07. and the unveiling of the finished work will take place on Friday, 22.07. at 18:00 in front of the mural itself on 23 Khan Asparuh str. - exactly one block from the pedestrian part of Vitoshka blvd.
The project is part of the Belgian Days and the creative program of the Visionary Foundation. It is realized with the financial support of the National Culture Fund, the One Year Grant `21 program, the Belgian Embassy in Bulgaria, and in partnership with the Belgium-Bulgaria-Luxembourg Business Club and 0511 Designs.
Gijs Vanhee (1982) lives in Mechelen, Belgium, and has a background in illustration. He had a passion for drawing and graffiti since his childhood, but since 2016 he tries to tell a coherent story throughout his body of work, that spreads out over paper, canvas, print, digital art, and mural paintings. Narrative drawings in which humans with the head of a bird play a leading role. The search for freedom forms the common thread throughout his work, as well as the balance between nature and society. His works are an invitation to take time to stop and look around, to search in the details for stories or questions about us humans or how we are drifted away from who we are. Always with a touch of melancholy but never melodramatic. Sometimes the work is autobiographical or tells an anecdote about the place, and often he uses images he has seen somewhere but put them in a different context. His drawings have a very recognizable style, often in black and white or with limited use of colour. With murals, the elements or textures present usually play an important role in the work.