Krista Autio:
‘I’m a Finnish artist and have lived, completed my studies and worked outside my home country since I graduated from Vapaa Taidekoulu (Free Art School) in Helsinki. My work is thus influenced by the everyday life, habits, daily rhythms and art from the countries where I have lived i.e. France, Spain and Belgium. At the same time, I stayed true to my own way of painting, my own instinct and my own inner need , often emotional – perhaps linked to my Finnish culture – to look for something simple and essential.

I work mainly with oil colours and large surfaces and paint layer after layer with a small palette knife, a spatula. I have had exhibitions in Finland, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Spain and the US. In 2016 I founded K41, an artist-run project space located in Brussels. I curate exhibitions mostly from Nordic contemporary artists living in Benelux countries. ‘

Colette Cleeren (1953, Hasselt) is printmaker, draughtsman and painter. Colette Cleeren studied Graphic Arts at the Sint-Lucaspaviljoen in Antwerp and Graphic Arts and Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hasselt. She completed her training in various studios such as the International Frans Masereel Centre for Printmaking. She has been invited for a residency in The Guanlan Original Printmaking Base in China. Her work has been selected for many national and international exhibitions. She received many national and a number of international awards. She supplied visual artwork for “Blindganger”, a collection of poems by Gerda De Preter, participated with literary men and women in several projects and has publications to her name in poetry and art magazines.

She lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.

Olivier Deprez (1974, BE) is an observer of our suburban environments, which he dissects and analyses through his drawings and paintings. Vital to his approach is the examination of structures in images, their meaning and in particular the power structures inscribed in them.

By meditating on modern suburbia his work invites the spectator to dialogue with this very large but neglected part of our society. The vast majority of people nowadays live in suburban areas. His work is about noticing this new environment for mankind, which is so obvious it is overlooked in our iconographies.

The basis for his images lies in sketches and notes made on various locations.

These places remain as such recognizable but they are never translated directly into paint. Through a number of studies the artist flattens out small details, so that his images acquire a strange anonymity. The goal is not physical likeness, but the selection of certain key visual elements. Rather than simply recreating he is highlighting the underlying geometry of forms by playing with abstraction, colour and perspective.

Objects are stripped from their original context and inserted into an artificial setting. They become archetypes or symbols used in a world that is not their own.

By creating a subtle balance between description and abstraction in his works (drawings and paintings) he is challenging our current understanding of suburbia as to provoke a reconsideration of these al to familiar places and the objects that inhabit it.