Alice Vanderschoot

Bio I Selected works | CV

Portrait by Jana Pollet. Courtesy of the artist and BARBÉ.

Alice Vanderschoot’s love of material and color goes beyond the tactile. Soft, playful, naive, pastel textures become one with architectural, hard, cold metals. The artist is intrigued by the mechanism of things. By what is in, behind and beneath the beautiful sculpture. Scaffolding, fencing and inner workings mostly serve to conceal, support or function, but Vanderschoot brings them radically to the forefront. The illusion of movement, of feather light and leaden, of feminine and masculine, of organic forms and clean lines brings an intense tension and aesthetic dynamism that has a deeper intention besides beauty. Vanderschoot grants a glimpse behind the scenery of life. She not only shows the beautifully lit and polished stage. She also seeks out the wings. The chosen materials and techniques refer both to their underlying emotional world and to the procedure of sense deception, like a deus ex machina of the blind spot. Packaging boxes, fruit: for Vanderschoot, inspiration can be found everywhere. By playing with scale, de-contextualizing identifiable objects and using attractive colors, her imagery is indebted to the dream world of Surrealism and the cartoonish directness of Pop art. Hyper-aware, she analyzes the avalanche of images that pass by daily through advertising, social media and art history. Thematically, there is the same alertness as during Popart for consumerism and mass media but Vanderschoot goes further and challenges collective memory. With humor and an insidious playfulness and naiveté, the archetype, myth and symbolic value of an image is explored. Once the train of references has departed, one image evokes a whole universe. Vanderschoot sees how certain shapes keep returning, evolving organically from object over symbol to archetypes or mythical figures.

Vanderschoot graduated MFA Sculpture at KASK, Gent, BE. A selection of past exhibitions include; several group show at BARBÉ, Art Antwerp, Plus-One gallery, Felix Art & Eco Museum, Sculpture Garden at Rubenskasteel , Archipel, St-Denijs City, Ponti, Ballroom gallery, Diskus, Everyday gallery, Art Rotterdam (NL) and Art Brussels (BE) . In 2023 she had a solo at De Poortersloge ‘All That Glitters' in Bruges after winning the laureate of CC Brugge. In 2024, she had her first solo gallery show at BARBÉ, and recently, the city of Dendermonde commissioned a monumental wall sculpture, which is now publicly exhibited.