1952–1981: Youth and education Philippe Vandenberg was born in 1952, surnamed Vandenberghe. He was raised in
Sint-Denijs-Westrem, a village near
Ghent that was governed by his father, the liberal mayor of the township between 1970 and 1976. Growing up in a bourgeois family, the artist spoke both French and Dutch at home. At a young age he started to draw on a daily basis. When visiting the
Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent as a teenager, the paintings by 16th to 20th century masters made a lasting impression. Between 1970 and 1972, Vandenberg studied literature and art history at the
Ghent University, before enrolling full-time at the Royal Academy of Art of Ghent in 1972. For these works he was awarded the Prix Emile Langui for painting at the Prix Jeune Peinture Belge that same year, leading to a one-year residency in the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. His works of the subsequent years are activated by a fierce stroke of the brush and swing between expressionist figuration and abstraction. The cycle
De Geboorte (Birth), painted following the birth of Mo, his son with Mieja, was exhibited in the Richard Foncke Gallery in Ghent in 1983. It marked the start of a collaboration that would last for two decades. A 1986 solo show in New York at the Denise Cadé Gallery led to the acquisition of a painting by the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 1988 Vandenberg traveled to Southwest America. He began to use motifs derived from graffiti art, as well as images distilled from comic books. In 1989, he introduced references to world politics into his work, such as swastikas, portraits of political or religious leaders, and men carrying dollar bills. In 1995,
Het zevende zegel (The Seventh Seal), one of his first large-scale ensembles, was shown in
JOB XIII, 12, an exhibition curated by Jan Hoet for the Museum of Contemporary Art (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent. It marked the reconciliation between the artist and the curator, after the latter had publicly disavowed his work in 1989. Also in 1995, two radical gestures intersect his oeuvre: Vandenberg overpainted older works with layers of black paint, known as his
Grandes noires (Large Blacks), and employed his own blood for a series of drawings. Furthermore, his many lectures of that period herald the start of a series of essays in which he reflects on his art and artistry. In the mid-nineties, Vandenberg often resided in Marseille and travelled to Indonesia, Laos, Thailand, and Cuba. Inspired by the crucial interventions of 1995, he also started to work on larger ensembles.
Le Cannibal en Larmes (The Cannibal in Tears), a series of blood drawings, was succeeded by ''L'esprit est voyageur, l’âme est vagabonde'' (The Spirit Is a Traveller, The Soul Is a Vagabond). In the latter ensemble, which was first shown at Albert Baronian in 1997, he combined word paintings with panels populated by fairy-tale characters and Old Testament figures. In 1999, Vandenberg had first retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp (M HKA).
2000–2009: Geometry, words and figuration After his M HKA show Vandenberg frequently resided in Paris, where he drew and wrote, and devoured films in the local cinemas. In 2000, he returned to The Royal Academy of Ghent to take up a one-year teaching position. Suffering from depression and substance abuse, he was confined to hospital in 2001. The same year he completed a series of portraits that he had originally started in 1999. These include depictions of Ulrike Meinhof, a leader of the Red Army Faction, the writer and dramatist Antonin Artaud, and a number of self-portraits. At the same time, he painted the cycles
L’Ennemi Intérieur (The Enemy Inside),
In Memoriam Ulrike Meinhof and
Étude pour Artaud (Study for Artaud), which depict the subjects of these paintings being violently attacked. When leaving Ghent for Brussels in 2005, Vandenberg bought a studio in Molenbeek. Another monochromic phase was preluded when he started to overpaint works in grey, orange and yellow. Letters and words reappeared on these monochrome canvases, like the enigmatic K.A. or the sentence
L’important c’est le kamikaze (The Importance Is the Kamikaze), which was also the title of his 2006 exhibition at the Musée Arthur Rimbaud in Charleville-Mézières in France. Vandenberg committed suicide in 2009. ==Selected exhibitions==