Hans Op de Beeck

Sea of tranquillity

Expo event

October 25, 2024 to February 23, 2025

As part of the exhibition Paquebots 1913 - 1942. Une esthétique transatlantique, the Musée d'arts de Nantes has invited the art center Le Grand Café in Saint-Nazaire to take over the Chapelle de l'Oratoire with an adaptation of Hans Op de Beeck's Sea of tranquillity.

  • Contemporary art
  • Oratory Chapel

Last update: Wednesday, February 12 at 4:07 PM

Book your ticket

Buy your ticket for the Paquebots exhibition and reserve your visit time on the online ticketing service or at the museum ticket office.

Reservations strongly recommended at weekends, on public holidays and during vacation periods. Access to the exhibition is only guaranteed if you reserve a slot.

Book
  • The exhibition

    Hans Op de Beeck is a creator of between-worlds. His works, suspended between past and future, fiction and reality, probe a contemporary universe that resembles a mirage, a sensory vertigo where the familiar rubs shoulders with the strange.
    Nourished by literature and cinema, the artist embodies his visions in a combinatorial and scenographic model. From installation to sculpture, from video to animated film, from short story writing to painting and drawing, from photography to sound, the mediums he employs all seem to converge towards the definition of a topos: a mental theater, projecting the viewer into a reflexive, social and cultural experience, an intimate reflection of the human condition.

    In 2008, during a study visit to Saint-Nazaire, Hans Op de Beeck was struck by the remarkable historical development of this port city, whose shipyards produce the world's largest cruise liners. These appeared to him as the ultimate archetype of contemporary luxury, symptomatic of the Western world's relationship with certain concepts: free time, work and consumption, utopia.

    View of Hans Op de Beeck's Sea of Tranquillity exhibition at Grand Café - center d'art contemporain
    art center, Saint-Nazaire, 2010. Marc Domage

    This was the starting point for the Sea of Tranquillity project, a major new cycle in the artist's work, for an exhibition hosted, after Le Grand Café de Saint-Nazaire which produced the exhibition in 2010, in three European institutions.

    View of Hans Op de Beeck's Sea of Tranquillity exhibition at Grand Café - center d'art

    Sea of Tranquillity: this title refers both to the Dutch expression "Zee van Rust", which describes the experience of a suspended moment, an ocean of calm. And in Latin, "Mare Tranquillitatis" refers to a lunar sea, where the module of the American Apollo 11 mission, which enabled men to walk on the Moon, landed. Finally, there's a touch of irony in what a cruise can offer these days.

    Hans Op de Beeck's exhibition project revolves around a monumental model of a fictitious ship, the Sea of Tranquillity. A short film combining real actors and 3D environments plunges the viewer virtually into the lair of this strange, menacing liner, which gently splits the night.

    Hans Op de Beeck was born in Turnhout (Belgium) in 1969. He lives and works in Brussels.

    Text by Eva Prouteau.

    Le Grand Café - center d'art contemporain d'intérêt national is a project strongly linked to the city of Saint-Nazaire, offering a framework conducive to the observation of current societal transitions. It organizes three exhibitions a year within its walls, as well as regular off-site projects. Prospecting, artistic experimentation and the production of works are the hallmarks of Le Grand Café.

    The art center also supports artists and curators through its residency program, and promotes research through "Substrat", a program for doctoral students in art history. In parallel, Le Grand Café publishes editions and organizes meetings, conferences and cultural events throughout the year.
     

  • In photos